The Victorious Opposition Read Online Free PDF Page B

first time.
In biographies of Custer, I’ll have half a dozen index entries as his adjutant. Immortality—the tradesman’s entrance.
    But that wasn’t necessarily so, as he knew too well. People might remember him forever—if Utah blew up in his face. Even back as far as the trouble it caused in the Second Mexican War in the early 1880s, Custer had wanted to lay it waste. Abner Dowling shook his head.
Enough of Custer.
    These days, Dowling had an adjutant of his own, a bright young captain called Isidore Lefkowitz. He looked up from his desk in the outer office as Dowling emerged from his sanctum. “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked, his accent purest New York.
    “Mr. Young is due here in ten minutes, isn’t that right?” Dowling said.
    “Yes, sir, at three o’clock sharp,” Lefkowitz replied. “I expect him to be right on time, too. You could set your watch by him.”
    Dowling’s nod also made his chins dance. “Oh, yes.” Heber Young was a man of thoroughgoing rectitude. Mischief in his eye, he asked, “How does it feel, Captain, to be a gentile in Utah?”
    Captain Lefkowitz rolled his eyes. “I should care what these Mormon
mamzrim
think.” He didn’t translate the word. Even so, Dowling had no trouble figuring out it was less than complimentary.
    He said, “The Mormons are convinced they’re persecuted the way Jews used to be in the old days.”
    “What do you mean, used to be?” Lefkowitz said. “Tsar Michael turned the Black Hundreds loose on us just a couple of years ago. If the peasants and workers go after Jews, they don’t have to worry about whether they might have done better throwing out Michael’s brother Nicholas and going Red. There are pogroms in the Kingdom of Poland, too.”
    “People over there use Jews for whipping boys, the same way the Confederates use their Negroes,” Dowling said.
    Lefkowitz started to answer, stopped, and gave Dowling an odd look. “That’s . . . very perceptive, sir,” he said, as if Dowling had no business being any such thing. “I never thought I had much in common with a
shvartzer
”—another untranslated word Dowling had little trouble figuring out—“but maybe I was wrong.”
    Before Dowling could answer, he heard footsteps coming down the hall. A soldier led a tall, handsome man in somber civilian clothes into the outer office. “Here’s Heber Young, sir,” the man in green-gray said. “He’s been searched.”
    Dowling didn’t think Brigham Young’s grandson was personally dangerous to him. He didn’t think so, but he hadn’t rescinded the order that all Mormons be searched before entering U.S. military headquarters. He’d been in the office with General Pershing when the then-commander of occupation forces was assassinated. The sniper had never been caught, either.
    Officially, of course, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints remained forbidden in Utah. Officially, Heber Young had no special status whatever. But, as often happened, the official and the real had only a nodding acquaintance with each other. “Come in, Mr. Young,” Dowling said, gesturing toward his own office. “Can we get you some lemonade?” He couldn’t very well ask a pious (if unofficial) Mormon if he wanted a drink, or even a cup of coffee.
    “No, thank you,” Young said, accompanying him into the private office. Dowling closed the door behind them. He waved Young to a seat. With a murmured, “Thank you, Colonel,” the local sat down.
    So did Abner Dowling. “What can I do for you today, Mr. Young?” he inquired. He was always scrupulously polite to the man who headed a church that did not officially exist. Despite half a century of government persecution and almost twenty years of outright suppression, that church still counted for more than anything else in Utah.
    “You will remember, Colonel, that I spoke to you this past fall about the possibility of programs that would give work to some of the men here who need it so badly.”