The Victorious opposition

One shot rang out in the middle of the night: a guard blowing his brains out. He got buried, too, with almost as little fuss as if he were one of the blacks so casually disposed of.

When the promised-the threatened-new shipment of Negro prisoners arrived, Camp Dependable was able to take them. Pinkard wondered if he would get a congratulatory call from Ferd Koenig. He didn't. Maybe that made sense, too. After all, he'd only done what the attorney general needed him to do.

Scipio wished to God he could get out of Augusta. But it wasn't so easy as it would have been a few years before. Things had tightened up. Everywhere a black man went, it was, "Show me your passbook, boy." If he started working in, say, Atlanta, he would have to produce the document that proved he was himself-or proved he was Xerxes, which amounted to the same thing. And if he did that, he would be vulnerable to either A

He didn't think his boss at the Huntsman's Lodge had anything in particular against him. He knew damned well his former boss at the former Marshlands plantation did. But he didn't like the idea of being vulnerable to Dover much better than he liked being vulnerable to Miss A

At the restaurant, the rich white men who ate there talked more and more of war. So did the newspapers. Jake Featherston was thumping his chest and foaming at the mouth because Al Smith wouldn't give him what he'd promised not to ask for the year before. Scipio remembered too well what a catastrophe the last war had been for the Confederate States. Under other circumstances, the prospect of a new one would have appalled him.

Under other circumstances… As things were, he more than half hoped the CSA did start fighting the USA gain. All eyes, all thoughts, would turn toward the front. They would turn away from a town in the middle of nowhere like Augusta. And he had heard some of the things bombing airplanes could do nowadays. That made him all the gladder Augusta was a long, long way from the border.

What made life harder was that whites weren't all he had to worry about in Augusta. The Terry was full of sharecroppers displaced from the land by the tractors and harvesters and combines that had revolutionized farming in the CSA since the Freedom Party came to power. The Terry, in fact, held far more people than it held jobs. A man who wasn't careful could easily get knocked over the head for half a dollar-especially a man who wasn't young and who had to wear a penguin suit to and from work, so he looked as if he had money.

Scipio made a point of being careful.

Coming home was worse than going up to the Huntsman's Lodge. Going to work, he had to face harassment from whites who fancied themselves wits. Most of them overestimated by a factor of two. He had to give soft answers. He'd been doing that all his life. He managed.

He came home in the middle of the night. Darkness gave predators cover- and the Augusta police rarely wasted their time looking into crimes blacks committed against each other. Every street corner on the way to his apartment building was an adventure.

Most of the time, of course, the corners were adventures only in his own imagination. He could-and did-imagine horrors whether they were there or not. Every once in a while, they were. He walked as quietly as he could. He always paused in the blackest shadows he could find before exposing himself by crossing a street. Nobody had worried about street lights in the Terry even before the rise of the Freedom Party. These days, the idea of anyone worrying about anything that had to do with blacks was a painful joke.

Voices from a side street made Scipio decide he would do better to stay where he was for a little while. One black man said, "Ain't seen Nero for a while."

"You won't, neither," another answered. "Goddamn ofays cotched him with a pistol in his pocket."

"Do Jesus!" the first man exclaimed. "Nero always the unluckiest son of a bitch you ever seen. What they do with him?"

"Ship him out West, one o' them camps," his friend said.

"Do Jesus!" the first man said again. "You go into one o' them places, you don't come out no more."

"Oh, mebbe you do," the other man said. "Mebbe you do-but it don't help you none."

"Huh!" the first man said-a noise half grunt, half the most cynical laugh Scipio had ever heard. "You got dat right. They throws you in a hole in the ground, or else they throws you in the river fo' the gators and the snappers to finish off."

"I hear the same thing," his friend agreed. "Gator sausage mighty tasty. I ain't go

He waited till their footsteps faded before he went on to his apartment. The Huntsman's Lodge served a fair amount of wild game: venison, raccoon, bear every once in a while, and alligator. Scipio had been fond of garlicky alligator sausage himself. He didn't think he would ever touch it again.

Three days later, he was walking to work when police and Freedom Party stalwarts with submachine guns swept into the Terry. They weren't trying to solve any specific crime. Instead, they were checking passbooks. Anybody whose papers didn't measure up or who didn't have papers, they seized.

"Let me have a look at that there passbook, boy," a cop growled at Scipio.

"Yes, suh." Scipio was old enough to be the policeman's father, but to most whites in the CSA he would always be a boy. He didn't argue. He just handed over the document. Arguing with a bad-tempered man with a submachine gun was apt to be hazardous to your life expectancy.

The cop took a brief look at his papers, then gave them back. "Hell, I know who you are," he said. "You been paradin' around in them fancy duds for years. Go on, get your black ass outa here."

"Yes, suh. Thank you kindly, suh." Scipio had taken a lot of abuse from whites for going to work in a tuxedo. Here, for once, it looked to have paid off. He got out of there in a hurry. That was unheroic. He knew it. It gnawed at him. But what could he do against dozens of trigger-happy whites? Not one damned thing, and he knew that, too.

He'd gone only a few blocks when gunfire rang out behind him: first a single shot, then a regular fusillade. He didn't know what had happened, and he wasn't crazy or suicidal enough to go back and find out, but he thought he could make a pretty good guess. Somebody must have figured his chances shooting it out were better than they would have been if he'd gone wherever the cops and the stalwarts were taking people they grabbed.

The fellow who'd started shooting was probably-almost certainly-dead now. Even so, who could say for sure he was wrong? He'd died quickly, and hadn't suffered much. Scipio thought of alligators, and wished he hadn't.

One of the waiters, a ski

"Du

"What do you suppose he did?" Dover asked. "He's never given anybody any trouble here."

"Du

Jerry Dover rubbed his chin. "He's a pretty fair worker. Let me make a call or two, see what I can find out."

What would he have done if Nestor were a lazy good-for-nothing? Washed his hands like Pilate? Scipio wouldn't have been surprised. He didn't dwell on it. With the crew shorthanded because Nestor wasn't there, he stayed hopping.