by James Philip
She remembered being in the Main State Building and the rattle of automatic gunfire, the darkness and nothingness; in that darkness and nothingness Dan had come to Washington to find her. Well, whatever was left of her.
She panicked when Dan was not there the next time her conscious mind put up a periscope to test her new reality.
“Dan,” she murmured.
He was there in a moment.
A cool cloth dabbed at her parched and cracked lips.
“You’re safe, Gretchen.”
“Safe?” The word had no immediate meaning or context.
“Things are still a bit crazy out on the streets but the 101st Airborne have got this neighbourhood nailed down. They say there’s been no serious fighting in DC for three or four days now.”
For the first time Gretchen squeezed his hand back.
“Your father is here in DC,” the man went on. “He’s visited every day and most evenings. He’s been to the White House a couple of times. There’s talk of transferring the Federal Government to Philadelphia or New York while DC is rebuilt. Things are pretty messed up hereabouts...”
Gretchen tried to speak but her throat was on fire.
A straw was gently, tenderly placed between her lips.
“Try to drink. Just sip. They had to do a whole lot of things to your throat and to your neck, it will be as sore as Hell until it all heals up.”
The drops of water tasted like the finest wine as they dribbled into her mouth. The man mopped up excess fluid as it escaped her lips.
“I was with the Under Secretary of State when,” she began after perhaps a silence of a minute, “there was huge explosion...”
“Under Secretary Ball didn’t make it,” she was informed apologetically. “They didn’t find you until the next day and you were the only survivor in the part of the Main State Building that they found you in, Gretchen.”
There must have still been hundreds of people in the building when the first bomb went off.
This was insane...
“There was an attempt to overthrow the government,” Dan explained, belatedly concluding that he was just confusing Gretchen. That was both careless and cruel, and that would never do. He spoke slowly and carefully. “It caught the President and the military completely by surprise and it was a day or so before reinforcements arrived in the city and began to take back all the buildings and ground the rebels had seized. There were huge fights around the Pentagon, Capitol Hill and the White House, I daresay. It is all very confusing at the moment and a lot of people have been killed and injured. The Marines who discovered you at the Main State Department Building transferred you to an emergency field hospital in Rawlins Park, and then the Navy brought you to Bethesda by helicopter. They didn’t know who you were but I identified you from the documentation the medics at Rawlins Park sent over with you.”
The man stopped speaking because he had forgotten to breathe.
“How did you know I would be here?” Gretchen whispered.
Dan hesitated. How could he tell the woman he had loved – basically, from first sight at an ‘at home’ in Quincy held by a senior partner in her law firm the summer before the October War – that he had sat down and after thinking things through recognized that the only place he was likely to find her alive was at the one functioning major hospital in the city?
“I came here because I was afraid that if I you hadn’t been brought here that you were most likely dead, Gretchen,” he confessed. “And I wasn’t prepared to face that until there was no hope left.”
“Good call,” she groaned. Talking was wearing her out but she had to know how bad things were before she slept again. She had to know. “How,” she began, stopped to marshal her failing strength, “how bad am I...”
The man leaned close so she could see his face.
“They don’t know how bad, Gretchen.” He touched his brow with his free hand. “You had a fractured skull. They were afraid you might be blind or worse; but you’re not. Blind, that is, or any of the things they warned me about because you can see me and you can talk, so that’s good. There are busted bones in your neck and your back and the guys who rescued you from the State Building and got you here couldn’t help moving you about in ways that probably made those fractures a lot worse. They’ve immobilised you to stop any more nerve damage while stuff knits back together.” He moved on hurriedly. “You got shot twice in the back. One of the bullets penetrated your left lung. Your left leg was bust, too, but that will heal up fine in time...”
“Do they think I’ll be paralysed?” Gretchen asked softly.
Dan contemplated a bare-faced lie.
No, she deserved so much better than that.
Only the truth would suffice.
“They don’t know,” he admitted with a lump rising in his throat and moisture welling in his eyes. “They say it’s too early to tell. They say we may not know for weeks or even months.”
Chapter 32
Wednesday 18th December 1963
The Ash Grove, 8162 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles
Ed Pearl, the 26 year old owner of the Ash Grove club – really a big coffee house with a stage – viewed Vincent Meredith with easy going caution and handed back his business card. He yawned, rubbed sleep from his eyes with the heels of his hands and tried to come to terms with the new day.
“This is kind of early in the day for me, Mr Meredith. The club was open until after three this morning.”
“I apologise, Mr Pearl. I’m happy to come back later in the day...”
The younger man grinned and waved to a nearby table.
On stage a skinny teenage kid was tuning an electric guitar and running cables.
“Take a seat, Mr Meredith. I need a coffee. How about you?”
A little later the two men sized each other up across the top of their cups.
Vincent Meredith had heard that Ed Pearl was a regular guy with none of the attitude of the other club owners. He was a musician who had set up the club – implausibly – simply because he loved the music he staged. By all accounts that ‘music’ was extraordinarily varied and eclectic. The name of the club was from an old English folk song of the same name but one night Ed Pearl would put on Johnny Cash or Phil Ochs, another night old Delta bluesmen; country, folk, protest, rockabilly and bluesy soul was all just music, each genre as respected and honoured as any other.
“I represent Sam Brenckmann,” the lawyer re-iterated. He would never have got past the front door of the club if he had not mentioned Sam’s name up front.
“Sam’s the man,” Ed Pearl replied. “That was bad shit over at The Troubadour the other week. The word on the street is that the LAPD put Sam and Doug in the frame?”
The kid on stage had started playing bluesy riffs, oblivious to a man sweeping up in front of the stage and the two men chatting fifteen feet away. The kid stopped playing, picked up another electric guitar and began picking, re-tuning.
“That’s the way it looks,” Vincent Meredith agreed, belatedly recognising that he was pushing at an open door. Mistakenly, he had anticipated dealing with Ed Pearl would be like pushing a square wheeled cart up a hill. “I’m trying to get a handle on Doug Weston. Why would somebody torch The Troubadour like that?”
The LA Fire Brigade were unhappy that the cops did not seem to be taking the arson attack on The Troubadour seriously; this Vincent knew because one of the LAFB investigators had been so unhappy he had let him have sight of a copy of the preliminary report on the incident.
“Doug Weston?” Ed Pearl smiled. He was a sallow skinned man of no more than average height, not the sort to stand out in a crowd and modest with it. In the five years the Ash Grove had been running he had acquired a reputation for supporting local and national good causes and for providing a platform to any group seeking to promote the civil rights agenda. “Doug can be a real tool,” he declared with wry resignation. “Doug picks fights with people he doesn’t need or want to be picking fights with, and he gets
possessive with his ‘residents’. That’s fine when we’re talking about guys like Sam Brenckmann, Sam can be a tough guy when he needs to be, he can stand up for himself and he knows exactly where Doug’s coming from. Don’t get me wrong. Doug’s a good guy, he’s given a lot of people their first real break and he’s got better contacts than I have with the A and R people from Columbia and the other big record companies. He’s more a wannabee promoter than me. Me, I just want to fill up the club and listen to the music but it’s all just business to Doug. Like I said, don’t get me wrong, Doug loves the music, some of it anyway, but the main thing for him is the business.”
Vincent Meredith absorbed this.
“The way I hear it Doug upsets a lot of people?”
“Yeah, I heard he was having a lot of trouble with Johnny Seiffert.”
The lawyer raised an eyebrow.
“Johnny Seiffert? Should I know that name?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Johnny operates out of San Francisco. He was Sam Brenckmann’s agent before the war. They say he was ‘bumping’ Sam’s girlfriend, Miranda, and that’s how Sam got sent on tour with a bunch of redneck no-hopers and ended up in Bellingham on the night of the war.”
Vincent Meredith had known Sabrina Henschal, the woman who was pay rolling his ‘private investigations’ for many years; bless her, although she had many fine qualities she was not the kind of woman a man could always trust to give him all the dope in advance. Unique example of her gender that she was she was information was a thing she tended to scatter-gun in all directions.
“Miranda?”
“Miranda Sullivan. Her folks used to be movie stars,” Ed Pearl explained, a little amused he was having to tell the attorney any of this. “She latched onto Sam because she thought he was the next Pat Boone but Sam ain’t never going to be that, not even when he’s famous.”
Vincent Meredith sighed.
“Well, he’s never going to be famous if he ends up doing ninety-nine years in San Quentin.”
“Is it looking that bad?”
“The LAPD have got him in the frame for the murder of a biker just after the fire at The Troubadour.”
In the background the kid on stage was on his feet, bowed over his guitar.
He began to chunter into a bluesy rumbling number.
“LAPD? You mean Reggie O’Connell?”
The older man said nothing, suspecting the club owner badly wanted to tell him everything that he wanted to hear.
“Doug Weston said to me that he was rousted by a couple of mean looking bikers working for Johnny Seiffert last month. They were waiting outside The Troubadour for Sam Brenckmann but Doug saw them coming and had them covered with a twenty gauge shotgun by the time the cops answered his call. Johnny reckoned he still ‘owned’ Sam. That’s shit of course. Johnny never paid Sam for the tour last year up in the North East.” Ed Pearl was frowning. “Is it true the cops cuffed Sam’s girlfriend the night of the fire and she had her baby in the back of an LAPD cruiser?”
Vincent Meredith nodded.
No matter how against the grain it went sometimes even an attorney at law had to be honest with a man.
“The cops who took Judy and Sabrina to the hospital got into a fight with the others who turned over Gretsky’s that night.”
Ed Pearl’s brusque, angry nod confirmed that he knew all about Gretsky’s, Sabrina Henschal, and Sam and Judy. Sabrina had said the owner of the Ash Grove was ‘one of us’. Meredith did not often trust what a client said so he had needed to confirm Sabrina’s judgement for himself.
“The fight was about the two youngest cops drawing the line at arresting a heavily pregnant woman and turning over a house full of women and kids just so ‘the Captain can wear thousand dollar suits’. When Reggie O’Connell’s boys got to The Troubadour they prevented Sam and Doug Weston trying to stop one of the bikers bleeding to death, beat up on them and drove them off. I don’t think the bikers Doug Weston shot got any medical treatment. Sam caught half-a-dozen buckshot pellets and the cops refused to treat his wounds for several hours until the National Guard turned up.”
“Yeah, right. That was a crazy night,” Ed Pearl whistled.
Vincent Meredith did not beat about the bush.
“Is Johnny Seiffert the sort of man who would burn down a club just to make a point?”
“Maybe. He’s a mean son of a bitch. He’s always got money to throw around, too. I heard he was busted a couple of times up in the Bay Area. Drug busts but nothing stuck. The way things are nowadays shits like Johnny must think they died and went to heaven. At least around here you know that as long as you pay Reggie O’Connell his tithe you’re not going to have to pay every grafter and loser who sticks out his hand.”
“Is it that bad?”
Ed Pearl nodded.
“That’s why Doug Weston thought he was safe pointing a shot gun at a little shit like Johnny Seiffert. The trouble with people like Reggie O’Connell is that if somebody is prepared to pay him more then all bets are off.”
On stage the young guitarist was starting the fill the club with reverberating, semi-orchestral chords.
“Should I know that kid’s name?” Vincent Meredith inquired as the rising crescendo of sound threatened to interrupt normal conversation.
“Ry,” Ed Pearl chuckled and with a shake of the head added, “Ry Cooder. And yeah, you probably should know his name!”
Chapter 33
Wednesday 18th December 1963
Special Isolation Facility No. 2, CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Captain Nathan Zabriski of the US Air Force had only known Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann of the US Navy twenty-four hours but he trusted the dapper, grey-eyed submariner. When they were introduced it was evident that the Navy man knew everything there was to know about him; that he was a war criminal, that his mother had attempted to assassinate the President and that some days if he was left alone in a room with a gun he would gladly blow his brains out...
‘Good to meet you Captain Zabriski,’ the Navy man had intoned with no trace of irony in his voice. Just sympathy and an uncanny empathy that said more than any words could have said that he too had spent some time in the last year in the dark, desolate place where Nathan now found himself.
His handshake had been dry and firm.
The two young officers had been left to introduce themselves in a lonely corridor, their minders having taken several steps back to give them the sensation, if not the reality, of privacy.
‘They say I’m here to help you ‘break’ my Ma?’ Nathan had asked rhetorically. ‘I know why I’m here but what did you do wrong, Commander?’
Walter Brenckmann had understood that the question was not meant seriously; the other man had to have been feeling like shit at a time like this and the mere fact that he was holding himself together so well spoke highly of his personal moral courage.
“Like you I’m obeying orders,” he had replied evenly. “Like we both did on the night of the war and like you did twelve days ago in the Mediterranean.”
The two men’s eyes had met, held a long contact.
‘To be honest I really don’t know why I’m here,’ Walter had confessed, a self-deprecating twinkle in his gaze. ‘My Pa was the first person to jump on your Ma when she pulled the gun in the Oval Office. I’m between postings and maybe some shrink here in Langley reckoned that might be a potential point of contact with your Ma. Either that or maybe, they just thought I’d be the sort of guy who’d understand a little of what you must be going through now. Honestly, I gave up trying to work out what goes on inside the heads of elders and betters a long time ago.’
Nathan had smiled. Despite himself he had smiled, albeit only momentarily.
‘I killed hundreds of innocent people on Malta,’ he had insisted.
‘What about on the night of the October War?’ The Navy man had shot back at him.
‘A lot more than just thousands,’ Nathan had rasped, tingling with anger.
&
nbsp; Walter had shrugged
“You and me both,” he had offered resignedly. ‘To this day I still don’t know where the birds I launched flew. I never want to know either. You didn’t get to have that choice, that’s really hard. I can’t begin to imagine how hard that must be, Captain. But at the end of the day we both obeyed orders. If we hadn’t the World would probably be an even bigger crock of shit.’
Now as Nathan Zabriski stared through the two-way mirror in the observation room behind Walter Brenckmann’s back at the sobbing, pathetic seemingly prematurely aged husk of a woman whom he lately only occasionally thought of as his mother, Nathan was not convinced he could go through with this charade. Edna Maria Zabriski had never been any sort of Mother to him; he had been beaten and neglected as a child, farmed out to foster parents time and again by the Air Force Welfare Division and when he was accepted into the Officer Candidate School at Lackland Air Force Base at San Antonio in Texas aged eighteen in 1956 he had effectively severed all contact with both his father – who had never been there for him when he needed him – and his mother, whom he had come to despise and rather pity. It had been explained to him that if the pathetic slobbering neurotic wreck of a woman in the interview room continued to refuse to co-operate with the CIA – apparently the Secret Service, having self-evidently failed to properly ‘vet her’ had been excluded by Presidential directive from any part in the interrogation of ‘the assassin’ – she would either be locked away in a secure asylum for the rest of her life, or sooner or later, be strapped into an electric chair. One part of him badly wanted to care what happened to her but he could not actually bring himself to feel anything for her but contempt.
Mainly he loathed himself.
It would have been much better for everybody concerned if he had died when the British fighters had chopped ‘The Big Cigar’ - and the other three 100th Bomb Group B-52s pressing home their attack on command and control centers, radar installations, dockyard installations and warships the Grand Harbour and the surrounding anchorages - out of a clear blue Mediterranean sky over Malta. The Big Cigar had just unloaded her bunker busters and a single, experimental thermobaric weapon – a fuel-air bomb which used oxygen from the surrounding air to initiate a high temperature, violent explosion which generated an intensely damaging shock wave, mimicking a small nuclear detonation – when the thirty-millimetre Aden cannon fire of an RAF Hawker Hunter jet that had had no right to be at combat height at the time of the attack, had chewed up the bomber so badly that it had virtually disintegrated around him. One moment he was watching his screens, following the radar traces of the bombs arrowing down towards their targets; the next he was falling through thin air in a cloud of pulverized aluminium, Perspex and what looked like strands of electrical cabling embedded in the shattered body parts of the other members of The Big Cigar’s crew. Instinctively he had hauled on his parachute handle. Thereafter he had watched in horror as The Big Cigar’s wingman – Follow Me Home – had plummeted down onto the Island of Gozo trailing a five mile long tail of smoke and fire...