American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,61

expensive black homburg.

Then it was back to Socialist Party headquarters to wait for the polls to close in the district and across the country. As the night lengthened, telephone lines and telephone clickers began bringing in reports. By the third set of numbers from her district, she knew she was going to beat Marcus Krauskopf: her lead was close to two to one.

Well before midnight, Krauskopf read the writing on the wall and telephoned to concede. “Mazeltov,” he said graciously. “Now that you’ve won, go right on being the conscience of the House. They need one there, believe me.”

“Thank you very much,” she said. “You ran a good race.” That wasn’t quite true, but matched his graciousness.

“I did what I could.” She could almost hear him shrug over the wire. “But you’ve made a name for yourself, it’s a Socialist district anyhow, and I don’t think this is a Democratic year.”

As if to underscore that, Maria Tresca exclaimed, “We just elected a Socialist in the twenty-eighth district in Pennsylvania. Where is that, anyhow?”

People looked at maps. After a minute or so, Herman Bruck said, “It’s way up in the northwestern part of the state. We’ve never elected a Socialist Congressman from around there before—too many farmers, not enough miners. Maybe the people really have had enough of the Democratic Party.”

“Even if they are finally fed up, it’s taken them much too long to get that way,” Maria said. As far as she was concerned, the proletarian revolution was welcome to start tomorrow, or even tonight.

The later it got, the more returns came in from the West. The first numbers from Dakota showed Hosea Blackford handily ahead in his district. “A sound man,” Herman Bruck said.

“Sound? Half the time, he sounds like a Democrat,” Maria Tresca said darkly.

But even her ideological purity melted in the face of the gains the Socialists were making. A couple of districts in and just outside Toledo that had never been anything but Democratic were going Socialist tonight. The same thing happened in Illinois and Michigan and, eventually, in distant California, too.

“Is it a majority?” Flora asked, a question she hadn’t thought she would need tonight. She’d been optimistic going into the election, but there was a difference between optimism and cockeyed optimism.

Except, tonight, maybe there wasn’t. “I don’t know.” Herman Bruck sounded like a man doing his best to restrain astonished awe. “A lot of these races are still close. But it could be.” He looked toward a map where he’d been coloring Socialist districts red. “It really could be.”

Every time Cincinnatus Driver got downwind of the Kentucky Smoke House, spit gushed into his mouth. He couldn’t help it; Apicius Wood ran the best barbecue joint in Kentucky, very possibly the best in the USA. Negroes from the neighborhood came to the Kentucky Smoke House. So did Covington’s whites. And so did the men who’d come down from the other side of the Ohio since the Stars and Stripes replaced the Stars and Bars atop the city hall. Nobody turned up his nose at food like that.

Lucullus—Lucullus Wood, now that his father Apicius, like Cincinnatus, had taken a surname—was turning a pig’s carcass above a pit filled with hickory wood and basting the meat with a sauce an angel had surely brought down from heaven. He nodded to Cincinnatus. “Ain’t seen you here for a while,” he remarked. “What you want?”

Cincinnatus stretched out his hands in the direction of the pit. For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to revel in the warmth that came from it: the weather outside held a promise of winter. “I want to talk to your pa,” he answered as he began to warm up himself.

Lucullus made a sour face. “Why ain’t I surprised?”

“On account of you know me,” Cincinnatus said. “I’ll be damned if I know how you can look like you done bit into a green persimmon when you’re takin’ a bath in the best smell in the world.”

“Only thing I smell when you come around here is trouble,” Lucullus said. He never missed a beat in turning the carcass or basting it.

With a bitter laugh, Cincinnatus answered, “That’d be funny, except it ain’t. I get into trouble around here, it’s trouble your pa put me in. Now”—he let his voice roughen—“can I see him, or not?”

Lucullus Wood was harder to lean on than he had been. He was twenty now, or maybe a year past, and had confidence in himself as a man. Even so, a