Part 7 (1/2)
”You allow n.a.z.is in your country?”
Rucker sighed. ”Yeah, that's the problem with people being free to be themselves-they're free to be themselves. Still, it's not like they get much traction with folks.”
”We said that in 1921.”
Rucker shook his head. ”That's the rub. Either you trust people's better nature and maybe you get hoodwinked once in a while, or you go down the path of a.s.suming everyone's bad nature, which is what the goose-steppers want when you break it all down. And if we make laws to protect people's freedom from what the goose-steppers want, then we just did their job for them.”
”Your system can't last, you know, Herr Rucker.”
”Maybe not. But I'd rather crash a bird taking her up than nose her into the ground intentional. And you'd be surprised at how well she's handled so far. I'm figuring not much beyond the propaganda gets heard about the Freehold in the Fatherland.”
The band took a break and they could speak in quieter tones.
”Why didn't you shoot the second two SD men?” Deitel asked. ”In the alley? Before you dropped your pistol.”
”I was wondering that myself. I reckon I was thinking if I could knock the second two out we might lose the other four. When this thing goes off, it pretty well announces to the world where you're at.”
Rucker pulled out his pistol and offered it to Deitel, handle first. Deitel held it at first like it was a snake that might strike him. It looked like a melding of the old cla.s.sic cowboy pistols and the newer, modern semiautomatics. Along the side Deitel read the inscription-COLT SELF-DEFENSE ENGINE MODEL 35. It was long, wooden-handled, and a combination of brushed steel and bra.s.s. Where a wheel would have been on an old revolver, there was a rectangular cartridge. The workings were beyond him, but there was visceral beauty he couldn't deny even if, as a doctor, all guns offended him.
Carefully, he handed it back to Rucker, who twirled it on his finger and slid it effortlessly into its holster.
Deitel took another sip of his whiskey and then swept his arm over the group of fliers at the bar.
”Your comrades seem very welcoming. Except the one called Lucky Lindy. Who, I must add, seems very familiar.”
”Lindy? Yeah, he was in all the papers back in 1924. First solo flight across the Atlantic-New Orleans to Paris in the Spirit of San Antonio,” Rucker said. ”A year later he got duped by Goebbels's propaganda machine and was quoted saying some nice things about old Adolf. After that, when newspaperman Henry Mencken broke the story in the Times Herald about the concentration camps and the starvation in former Poland, Lindy's stock dropped considerable, even though he was as appalled as anyone by what the n.a.z.is are up to.”
Deitel recalled all the press the young aviator had received, even in Germany. And he remembered the man's intemperate remarks praising the New Order in its early years.
”You and Herr Lindy both appear very young to have served in the war.”
”We were. Both of us were barely seventeen, and we lied about our age,” Rucker said. ”They needed pilots bad.”
” 'They' as in your country, or 'they' as in the Texas mercenary company?”
”Now now, Doc. You know the Freehold sat the war out. This was strictly a private affair for those of us young, dumb, and unbridled enough to want to join in that organized slaughterhouse.”
”Ach. Texas and the Swiss. I'm sorry, I do not understand this rigid adherence to neutrality you so treasure.”
”Wars ain't pretty. Most aren't worth the fuss. Oh, maybe a few were, I don't know. But even when they're right, they don't do much good for anyone. If someone tries to kill you, you have to try to kill 'em right back, as my grandpappy Mal used to say. But there's no profit in it and you lose something even when you win . . .”
Deitel didn't want to interrupt Rucker's pause; he could tell the flier was trying to find the right words to something difficult.
”. . . Maybe we're just still gun-shy from the reckoning we had a while back with all the blood spilled after the San Marcos Ma.s.sacre in 1846.”
Seeing Deitel's blank expression, Rucker added, ”That's when b.l.o.o.d.y Santa Ana tried for the third time to take Texas. What his men did at San Marcos was an obscenity. Texans went a little blood crazy. Marched the whole Texas army down to Mexico City”-blank look-”you know it as Jefferson Ciudad now-and, well, it got awful.
”Mexico City was burned to the ground. A lot of people who never wanted anything more than to feed their families and go about their business died, just like had happened in San Marcos. Many Mexicans fled south. Many more chose to swear allegiance to the Republic of Texas. Too many died on both sides.”
He took another sip.
”The Union States and the Northwest Alliance had the sins of their Indian Wars. Texas has the sin of the Mexican War,” Rucker went on. ”That kind of revenge-taking does something to your soul, whether you're a man or country and whether you're right or not.”
Deitel wasn't entirely sure Rucker was speaking only of events from the nineteenth century.
”After the smoke cleared and people started thinking clear again, they realized they'd rung a bell that couldn't be unrung. Best they could do was resolve not to do it again,” Rucker said. ”I always figured that's why they named the new city after Jefferson. That man always was the biggest champion of second chances North America ever saw. Said that's what this continent was for.”
Despite his extensive and exclusive education, all of this was new to Deitel. The history of North America, its union, its divisions, its many nations today-all of that was barely touched on even in the days of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany.
”I'm sorry,” he said, ”but that was almost ninety years ago. Why is this neutrality instinct still so strong today?”
”I don't know that I know,” Rucker said. ”This country was founded by folks who just wanted to be left alone. If you want to be left alone, you gotta be willing to leave alone. Plus, it's easier doing business with folks in other lands when your government hasn't been mucking around with the locals. It's easier to make money than it is to make war.”
Deitel shook his head, trying to hide his disgust at these people's continued, cra.s.s focus on the material.
”Yet you and many of your countrymen-even if it was as a private militia-fought in the Great War.”
Rucker nodded slowly.
”Just because we don't go colonizing and conquering don't mean we're pacifists. h.e.l.l, like as not any man or woman you see on the street from here to Cabo is carrying an equalizer,” he said. ”Nothing sinful about using a gun in defense. It's only when you pull it first.”
”So your free society requires that you walk around ready to kill all the time. It's barbaric,” Deitel said.
Rucker ignored that.
The German and the Texan ordered another round.
”You are right when you say that we Germans do not really understand your culture,” Deiter said. ”Your government-it is forbidden to meddle in religion and commerce. Your nation's army, air corps, and navy are a tenth the size of most western countries. Your government enters no protection treaties, even with your beloved French. You have no national manifest and no colonial expansion beyond your endless business ventures, which seem to pop up all over the world and aren't directed by anyone but their greedy capitalist owners.”
”And?” Rucker asked.
”To us-and forgive me if this sounds rude-this lack of direction is anarchy and self-indulgence. I don't advocate anything like what the National Socialists represent, but a modern nation needs a proper modern state. From our perspective, a modern state cannot be administered efficiently without progressive central planning.”
Rucker rocked his head. ”Who wants to be administered?” he finally said. ”If a man can't be trusted to run his own life, how is he supposed to run other folks'?”
Again Deitel was at loss. Part was his aversion to confrontation, part because he was sure that Rucker was baiting him.
The bartender told Rucker he had a phone call.
He was back in less than a minute.
”That was Lysander. You've been kicked upstairs. They want you in front of the Prometheus Society toot de suite,” Rucker said, pouring the last of his bourbon on the sawdust-covered floor.
Deitel thought they had to be-how did the English say it?-”having him on.” This couldn't be the executive board of regents for the Prometheus Society, which was the Freehold's virtual intelligence service.
He and Rucker had borrowed Chennault's coupe and driven toward the wooden-domed Capitol building, and Deitel was sure now he'd be taken to the real ministers in charge.
At last.
Only they'd driven right past the Capitol and to a diner about a mile away, which was just closing. Inside, he found six people sitting on the stools, along with Lysander Benjamin.