by James Philip
Actually, in Sabrina Henschal’s humble opinion the National Guard had dropped its pants, turned around, bent over and let the LAPD fuck it into a virtual coma! While it was unclear whether the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office had been complicit, or an accessory before or after the fact of this ‘rape’; or if it was simply a case of the left hand of the judiciary not knowing what the other was doing; the DA’s people had certainly not been on the ball in the last few days.
Sabrina had known practically nothing about the politics of the DA’s office, the politicking of the senior echelon of LAPD commanders or their incestuous relationship with the bigwigs in City Hall, or for that matter how completely gutless the part-time soldiers of the California National Guard could be in the absence of strong leadership from the top.
She had been happy living in her own little existential bubble up in Laurel Canyon, and not really cared what was going on down in the smoggy urban sprawl of the city. The October War had shaken her somewhat; once Sam had returned from the frozen north she had got over it. In Judy she had found a true sister; she did not even begrudge her Sam but right now she was on the war path big time!
“You haven’t heard a single word I’ve said to you the last five minutes,” Judy complained gently as Vincent Meredith’s seven year old Lincoln queued in the cool winter sunshine outside the gates of the California Institute for Men. Sabrina and the younger woman had sunk deep into the squashy seats in the back of the car, alternatively cooing and pulling faces at the sleeping bundle of new life Judy was currently rocking ever so gently in her arms.
“Sorry,” Sabrina sighed. “I just need everybody to know I’m keeping a list of arseholes to get even with when this is over. The list keeps getting longer!”
“I don’t care about getting even,” Judy retorted in a whisper, looking down as her baby daughter’s eyes flickered open for a moment and she almost awakened. “I just want Sam back.”
“Mrs Brenckmann’s got the right idea, Sabrina,” the middle aged attorney observed distractedly from behind the wheel. He was a lean, tanned man of no more than average height with a disdainful eye that dwelt long and distrustfully on any member of the LAPD who crossed his path. Sabrina had only been able to afford his services because he was ‘a friend’ and he was not bothered about the normal ‘advances’ every other lawyer in LA would have demanded before they even took her call. Vincent also had a history with the LAPD; the moment Sabrina had mentioned Van Nuys and Reggie O’Donnell he had been ‘in’. He reminded Sabrina why they had driven out to San Bernardino. “Getting Judy’s husband freed from custody is the first priority.”
Judy threw her friend an unconvincing frown.
“Sam and I aren’t married, Mr Meredith.”
“Yes, you are or the knuckleheads at Chino won’t let you past the gate,” the man countered wearily. “That’s just the way it is. Like I said when I agreed to take this thing on the deal is that you do things my way. Like we agreed?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t like telling lies, that’s all.”
The California Institute for Men had been opened in 1941 as the first purpose built big low security prison in the United States. Since the October War it had become a huge sprawling, partially tented holding center for anybody the State did not know what else to do with who did not obviously pose an immediate threat to the general populous. The place was a dumping ground for petty thieves, drug addicts, white-collar malfeasants, drunks, bail breakers and men awaiting a first pre-trial hearing anywhere in the greater Los Angeles area.
Judy stared out at the traffic around the Lincoln.
The last week had been the best, the worst, the most sublime, weirdest, most surreal, utterly terrifying week of her life. Given what she and Sam had gone through last winter that was really, really saying something!
Tabatha Christa Brenckmann – Kennedy had been Judy’s maiden name but like her married name, Dorfmann, she had not used it since the October War – had emerged into the world in the back of an LAPD cruiser on Mulholland Drive. That was all a pain-filled, unreal in a nightmarish sort of way, blur and mercifully she only recollected parts of it. Mainly the parts that hurt more than the others, Sabina’s mother-bear reassurance and, well, love actually and at some stage being presented with her thankfully, miraculously lustily squalling baby. The two young cops in the cruiser had been as blown away by the whole thing as the two women by the time they arrived at the hospital. They were probationers as yet hardly sullied by the milieu into which they had been inducted, and one of them had got into a fist fight with the others they had left behind in the Canyon...
Sometimes Judy wondered if she had dreamed that or if it had actually happened. Lying in a hospital cot with her daughter in her arms she had honestly believed the worst was over. But the worst had hardly begun. There had been a riot near the hospital, gunfights in the surrounding streets, at one point all the power had gone off in the maternity ward. And then Sabrina had discovered that The Troubadour had burned down and that there were at least twenty people dead.
Sabrina had hurriedly remembered to tell her Sam was alive.
In jail but alive.
The cops were charging his with being an accessory to murder...
And then Sam had been lost in the system!
And reappeared...
All the while her daughter had needed to be mothered; Sabrina had clucked around her like some kind of demented mother goose and the other women at Gretsky’s had circled the wagons to protect the newest addition to their little family.
“The thing you have to understand about the way the California Prison Service operates is that you have to play by its rules. Down on the gate or the cell door the average warden or guard doesn’t give two,” Vincent Meredith was about to say something vulgar but refrained at the last minute, “hoots about anybody’s constitutional rights. He just cares about what he thinks the prison’s rules say. And that’s just the knuckleheads who are half-way literate. When we get inside just be a nice quiet, polite wifey.”
Judy’s face pinched with vexation; partly because she liked to think that most of the time she was a ‘nice quiet, polite wifey’ even though she was not married to Sam. However, it was one thing being that, another entirely being described that way.
In the noisy, hangar-like waiting area just inside the razor-wire inner fences of the prison complex Judy discovered she was not the only woman with a relatively new born baby in her arms. The hall reverberated with the infernal wailing of infants needing to be fed and cleaned, and in many cases, loved a lot more than they were ever likely to be loved.
Judy felt uneasy surrounded by so many Blacks and Hispanics, was confused by the Latino babble of voices that made it impossible to overhear any other exchange in any language she comprehended.
The signs said NO BREAST FEEDING.
But there was no water to be had, no private corners and the toilets, just three for several hundred men, women and children, sat in a stinking, half-flooded outhouse.
Judy buried her daughter under the woolly shawl she used to swaddle her. Sabrina patrolled and stood in front of her, arms crossed and ready to take on all comers; the handful of bored guards stalking the crowded hall left the two women alone long enough for the baby to briefly forget her distress.
Periodically, a booming public address system broadcast a list of names.
The man calling the names sounded so bored that he might have been drunk.
“RAMIREZ, CHAVEZ, PORTER, BRENCKMANN...”
Chapter 21
Monday 16th December 1963
National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland
Claude Otto de Chateau-Betancourt – in the old days Joe Kennedy’s go to East Coast corporate litigator and legendary New England Democratic Party eminence grise – rose stiffly to his feet when the young man entered the ante-room. Betancourt had had his eye on Daniel Brenckmann, the second son of his friend and associate of many years, Walter from before the Cuban Mi
ssiles War. Moreover, nothing he had seen or learnt about the twenty-seven year old freshly minted member of the Massachusetts Bar who had safely chaperoned his daughter on the night of the war had remotely disappointed Claude Betancourt. Quite the contrary, in fact.
One way and another over the years the Brenckmann family had been of inestimable service to the Betancourts. The boy’s father had stepped up to the plate any number of times in recent years. Yes, Claude had kept Walter Brenckmann’s modest but highly reputable and very well regarded Boston practice alive during and after the 1945 wars but it had been, all things considered, probably among the wisest investments he had ever made. Walter Brenckmann senior was one of those attorneys whom everybody, even his opponents in court respected and liked, and more importantly trusted implicitly. The man positively reeked unimpeachable integrity; he was incorruptible at any price, an absolutely invaluable man to have at one’s side in extremis.
Latterly, Dan’s mother, the indefatigable Joanne Brenckmann had briefly taken Gretchen under her roof and astonishingly, given Gretchen’s wilfulness, successfully taken his daughter under her wing when the jackals were chasing her from pillar to post over J. Edgar Hoover’s lies that she was inappropriately ‘involved’ with her then boss, United States Deputy Attorney General Nick Katzenbach. Unfortunately, not even Joanne’s maternal diplomacy had prevailed upon Gretchen to stay away from DC.
On the morning after the rebellion kicked off in Washington Dan Brenckmann had persuaded Claude Betancourt’s staff to put his call through to him, no mean achievement in itself.
‘Gretchen had an appointment at the State Department just before the coup, or whatever it is, hit Washington, sir.’ The kid had not minced his words. ‘The whole city will be a closed military zone by now and that won’t change until long after the fighting is done. I have to find Gretchen.’
Bright kid, no matter how sold he was on the old man’s daughter he had thought things through. Dan Brenckmann – who was nobody in particular from Boston – was not going to get within fifty miles of DC at a time like this without being arrested or turned back or possible shot if he pushed his luck. None of which was going to help Gretchen if she had been caught up in the fighting.
Maddeningly, it had taken nearly twenty-four hours to obtain the clearances to get Dan Brenckmann, and two of Claude Betancourt’s beefier, ex-military staffers through to the beleaguered capital city.
Miraculously, Dan had located Gretchen on Thursday and been near or actually at her side ever since.
When Claude Betancourt, by then in despair, had got the kid’s call telling him that Gretchen was alive in intensive care at Bethesda, he had very nearly expired with relief. At that moment he would have given the boy a million dollars if he had asked, except no son of Walter and Joanne Brenckmann would ever ask for any kind of reward for doing the right thing. In any event Dan Brenckmann already thought he had won life’s lottery just finding Gretchen alive in the death and mayhem of what had been a great city only a few days before.
The story was still a little sketchy.
Mainly because Gretchen had still not recovered consciousness.
Notwithstanding, Dan had painstakingly unravelled a little of the barely credible tale of how she must have survived the bombing and the subsequent assault on the Main State Building at 2201 C Street, NW.
It seemed that Gretchen had been with George Ball, the Under Secretary of State when the first truck bomb detonated. Ball had died in this explosion, or been crushed by falling debris, nobody knew for sure which. Gretchen meanwhile had been briefly knocked out and buried. Possibly only minutes later there were further big detonations and rescuers carried her out of the Under Secretary’s office. By then there were gunmen in the building whose sole mission was to kill everybody.
It was like something out of a Gothic nightmare!
It seemed likely that Gretchen – unable to walk unaided and probably partially blinded – had been hidden in a small third floor storeroom and the door behind her locked. Both her companions in the hideaway were later discovered dead from multiple gunshot wounds from a fusillade fired randomly through the still locked door. Doctor’s speculated that Gretchen’s survival at this point was because the body of a Marine Corps Corporal – a man from the ceremonial guard platoon on duty that evening in the grounds of the Main State Building – had taken the brunt of this ‘volley of automatic fire’, meaning that both the bullets which had hit her already prone body must have lost the greater part of their ‘punch’ by the time they entered her back.
Gretchen and her dead companions had lain undiscovered for the best part of eighteen to twenty hours in that lonely, locked, darkened room. It was a measure of how lucky she had been that Gretchen was the only living survivor discovered in that part of the building during the day after the initial uprising.
For most of that day the ruined State department had been in the hands of the rebels who, after assuaging their blood lust had begun to systematically ransack the areas of the complex undamaged by fire before air strikes cleared the barricades off C Street and two companies of Marines from the newly bussed in 3rd Marine Division had stormed the Main State Building and over run the by then disorganised, exhausted and apparently, largely inebriated rebels in less than a bloody hour.
Gretchen had been taken first to an emergency field hospital at nearby Rawlins Park. This was where the medics had attempted to ‘document her’. She had been ‘Patient R0672MSB’ at that stage. ‘R’ indicated she had first been processed at Rawlins Park, ‘0672’ meant she was the six-hundred-and-seventy-second person ‘documented’, and ‘MSB’ meant she had been sent to the field hospital from either the Mains State Building or its immediate vicinity. Her age was assessed as ’25 to 30’, her height was measured as five feet nine inches, and her hair described as ‘brown’. Two partially deformed 5.56-millimetre rounds were removed from Gretchen’s back at Rawlins Park; one from beside her ninth vertebra, the other from the lining of her left lung. It had not been possible to x-ray her torso prior to operating to remove the bullets; or to assess the extent of her other internal injuries. The patient was ‘unconscious on arrival, throughout initial triage and processing, operative procedures and at the time of her transfer to NNMC’.
Although the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland had been attacked by rebels early in the uprising, this assault had been driven off by an ad hoc force of Navy MPs, State National Guardsmen and Marines who had raced to the hospital as soon as the fighting had broken out.
It was likely that Gretchen had been one of the first casualties from the ‘Foggy Bottom combat zone’ to be carried across the city to Bethesda on the so-called ‘Sikorsky Shuttle’. The courage and the sheer, bloody-minded tenacity of the men who flew the first four US Navy Sikorsky SH-3 Sea Kings that were diverted from ‘war missions’ to evacuate the most seriously wounded to the one remaining largely undamaged hospital in the city, would resonate down through the coming decades of American history. Hundreds of lives – like Gretchen’s – would have ended squalidly in overwhelmed, under-equipped and under fire emergency medical stations but for the bravery – which frankly, defied belief – of those men who had flown, time and again back into the fiercest fire fights. Eventually, dozens of helicopters had joined the mercy flights, many being shot down including two of the original four SH-3 Sea Kings.
At Bethesda x-rays revealed Gretchen’s skull was fractured, thankfully an undisplaced series of cranial fractures radiating out from an area approximately an inch above her left ear. She had three damaged vertebra – seven, nine and ten – again cracked, apparently undisplaced hairline fractures. Her left shoulder had been dislocated and her left calf broken, a clean break.
The crisis had come while she was on the operating table at Bethesda – surgeons were tidying up the bullet wounds, setting her broken left leg and investigating the mass of welts and deep bruises all over her torso for further soft tissue or organ damage – and Gretchen had stopped bre
athing.
Dan had read the notes of what had happened next with horror.
She had been dead on the table; nothing had seemed to work.
Then, after a tracheotomy, cardiac shocks and two minutes of manual resuscitation, Gretchen had spontaneously sucked air into her lungs via the tube in her throat and she had lived...
Mercifully, Dan had not known that, any of it until thirty-six hours later.
When he had got to the NNMC its gates were thronged with people desperately searching for missing loved ones and he would never have got into the hospital without the magical ‘clearances’ he had obtained from Claude Betancourt before setting out for DC.
By then the hospital had formed a small team specifically to identify the living, the dying and the dead coming through its doors. Dan had immediately offered his services, ensuring his new colleagues knew Gretchen’s details and where she might have been brought in from; thereafter he had started to systematically search the grief stricken wards overflowing with traumatised, suffering humanity.
Dan had know it was a long shot coming to Bethesda but the streets around the Main State Building were still a battlefield and if Gretchen was still in the middle of that she was probably dead. Except, he could not allow himself to think that way. If she was alive and safe someplace that was good, he would find her later.
But what if she was badly hurt?
Unable to defend herself?
Alive but helpless?
Where was she most likely to end up?
At around four o’clock on Thursday afternoon he had found himself standing at the foot of Gretchen’s bed. He had been trembling like a leaf, his eyes misted with unbearable relief...
‘Is she something to you?’ A nurse had asked him, touching his arm as she took a moment to draw breath amidst the ongoing mayhem.
Dan had sighed.
‘Yes. Pretty much everything actually.’
Claude Betancourt shook the younger man’s hand and held onto it for several seconds.