by James Philip
There was a quite cough at his shoulder.
“I think your mother is ready to be reunited with you, Captain Zabriski.”
Nathan did not move. In fact he made no indication that he had heard what had been said to him.
“Captain Zabriski?”
Follow Me Home had still had at least one of her big bombs onboard; the shock wave of its detonation had plucked at his parachute two miles away as the huge bomber had ceased to exist as it, and its trapped crewmen had come to earth. A few seconds later he had been in the water and it had been getting dark. He had not been picked up until around midnight; at that time the southern horizon was still lit by the fires of Valletta and the dazzlingly bright searchlights of the British patrol boats quartered the sea. It had been the weaker beam of the lamp of an ancient chugging Maltese fishing boat which had found him drifting helplessly in the fierce current of the Comino Strait between the main island of Malta and smaller Gozo to the north. At first the fishermen had thought he was an RAF flyer; Nathan had been convinced they would throw him back into the sea when they realized their mistake...
“Captain Zabriski?”
Nathan blinked; reality returned with all the subtle nuances of an unexpected punch in the solar plexus. The guilt and self-loathing rose like some unimaginably foul bile in his throat.
“It is time, Captain Zabriski.”
“Yes,” he grunted.
Edna Zabriski attempted to throw herself at her son in a whimpering flood of tears. Nathan stood tall, unemotional as his mother clung to him and sobbed loudly on his freshly pressed brand new uniform. After about a minute he stiffly held her at arms’ length.
“I thought you were dead!” The woman blurted. “The British killed you and the President was going to do nothing about it!”
Nathan had looked to Walter Brenckmann. The other man had stood aside, mutely witnessed the one-sided ‘reunion’. He nodded for the prisoner’s son to reply.
“The British saved my life, treated me well and put me on a plane back stateside at the earliest possible date, Ma.” He spread his arms. “Here I am.” He flicked his gaze to Walter. “Lieutenant-Commander Brenckmann kept his side of the deal. Now you’re going to answer all his questions or you will never see me again.”
This latter would be just fine by Nathan.
He took a seat beside Walter Brenckmann, Edna Zabriski took her place on the other side of the table, snivelling and periodically breaking down as her odd – there was no other word that did it justice – slowly story began to take shape.
She had been living in the city where she had been brought up, St Louis on the night of the war and only learned several weeks later that her estranged husband had been in Seattle. She had believed he would come back to her once his ‘fling’ with ‘that whore’ he ‘met working for Boeing’ was over. It seemed she had had some kind of breakdown in the early spring and been taken in by people from her local congregation. She was a devout Episcopalian, prone to periods of strident righteousness. She had fallen out with her ‘church friends’ and apparently come under the spell of a more fundamentalist, born again community that followed the teachings of a peripatetic firebrand preacher who had ‘communions’ in a dozen cities in the Mid-West, Kentucky and West Virginia.
The man Edna Zabriski described sounded like a cross between Rasputin, Wyatt Earp and a gun-toting snake oil salesman. It seemed he roamed the country evangelising the angry and the lonely, the gullible and lost souls who just want to believe in something. His text was vengeance, his appeal charismatic, talismanic, and to a third party who had never encountered him intensely nihilistic. The evils of the World would never be washed clean unless the blood of the guilty had been spilled, basically. Vengeance is mine. The trouble was that when Edna Zabriski spoke of ‘the Preacher’ there was awe in her voice and the light of righteousness in her eyes; suddenly the dowdy middle-aged woman in custody awaiting an appointment with the electric chair was instantly ten years younger, alive, filled with hope, half-way to redemption and atonement.
It seemed that the Preacher took ‘the chosen’ to his bed – well, the women leastways, especially if they were comely or willing virgins – and anointed and blessed only those he deemed fit to do the Lord’s work beside him.
Yes, Edna Zabriski had been one of the ‘lucky ones’.
The Preacher had known her carnally and he had given her ‘grace’ to ‘avenge the fallen’.
“Did this man force himself upon you, Edna?” Walter Brenckmann had asked.
“Oh, no!”
Walter had tried very hard to resist the temptation to constantly scratch his head in astonishment.
“It was the week before I took the train to Washington,” Edna Zabriski continued. Once she had started talking there was no stopping her. “The brothers and sisters already knew I had people in Washington,” she explained, “and they said they had friends who would vouch for me if I put in for a government job on Capitol Hill. He visited me that one time in September after I got the job at the White House. He promised that in the next world He and I will be married, together for all time. He took me to a hotel down town and while we lay together he told me what work the Lord had in mind for me.”
“And what work did the Lord have in mind for you, Edna?”
“To kill the Slayer of Nations, of course!” The woman retorted, giving Walter Brenckmann and theatrically schoolmistressy look before turning a more benign, forbearing scrutiny onto her stone-faced son. “I thought it would be easier than it was,” she added, distracted by a moment of doubt. “The President seemed like such a nice man when I actually met him. A real gentleman. He always said such polite things about the coffee I brought him. But I knew all along that he was the Devil’s servant.”
“How did you know that, Edna?” Walter inquired. The whole thing was like a bad dream populated with people so insane they would look out of place in Alice in Wonderland.
“He bears Lucifer’s mark on his forehead.”
Nathan Zabriski and the young naval officer exchanged incredulous looks.
“The mark of Cain!” Edna Zabriski insisted, disappointed that her son and her inquisitor could be so blind. “Our Lord said that there are none so blind as they who will not see!”
The two men viewed her thoughtfully, not knowing what if anything there was left to be said. Neither were trained interrogators and Walter Brenckmann was a little surprised that the professionals sitting behind the two-way mirrors had not yet stepped in.
Edna Zabriski was reciting something under her breath.
“I’m sorry, Edna,” he interrupted, “but I didn’t quite catch that?”
The woman looked up, met his stare.
“Ezekiel 25 verse 17,” she explained, no longer the meek, beaten down captive he had encountered earlier that day. “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them!”
Walter knew he was so far out of his depth he was drowning.
“Okay...”
“Galen taught me to recite Ezekiel 25 verse 17 when Lucifer’s claws reach out for me and my faith falters. I weakened that day in the White House. I had doubt. In that crowd in the Oval office I couldn’t say the words out aloud. I had to say them silently and by the time I finished the verse somebody had moved between me and the President. It must have been God’s will that another died in place of the Slayer of Nations’ that day.”
Galen!
“Who is Galen, Ma?” Nathan Zabriski asked, breaking his silence.
“The Preacher,” Edna Zabriski said as if she believed her son was hard of understanding. “My Preacher’s name is Galen Cheney.”
Chapter 34
Friday 20th December 1963
Geary Boulevard, Fillmore District, San Francisco
It was not a date. Or at least Miranda did not think it was; it was only the second time she had met Dwayne John alone outside of work. That was all. Tod
ay’s meeting had been at his suggestion when he learned she was staying over with her Aunt and Uncle that weekend and that day she planned to take her first day’s paid leave since joining the Office of the Governor of California in Sacramento nearly three months ago.
The big man had been waiting on the kerb at Geary and Fillmore; he grinned broadly as he opened the door of the cab. Today he was hatless but otherwise immaculately suited and booted, handsomely preened and for the first time, almost but not quite relaxed in Miranda’s presence.
“There’s this diner on Sutter,” he suggested. “It’s not far...”
“That sounds fine,” Miranda smiled. They had shaken hands without thinking and now – perhaps, recollecting their first drug-befuddled encounter on the night of the October War – they exchanged self-conscious, mutually self-deprecatory grimaces and stifled uncomfortable spasms of amusement. “Are you staying in the city over the weekend?” She asked as they settled into an unhurried walking pace down Fillmore Street.
“I’ve become a member of the Third Baptist Church’s communion,” the man explained. “I still don’t know too many folks hereabouts. Reckon I ought to get to know the brothers and sisters better. There’s an NAACP rally in Union Square tomorrow afternoon.”
The man was several inches taller than Miranda, six feet four if he was an inch. She knew that a willowy blond and a towering young black man would attract a lot of odd glances, even here in the Fillmore District. Strangely, she did not care.
At the diner they sat in a window alcove, and gazed at the traffic and passersby on Sutter Street. Outside it had been a cold, bright day. In the diner it was warm, quietly noisy with the background of voices, the clatter of crockery and orders being called.
Dwayne John had very brown eyes she noticed. Brown eyes, the inch-long nick of an old scar half-in, half-out of his left eyebrow and hands with fingers that seemed far too long and delicate given that the rest of his physique was custom made for a career as a heavyweight boxer. Idly, she wondered what little things the man was beginning to notice about her?
“I can’t face Darlene,” her companion confessed softly.
Miranda had only met Dwayne John’s former girlfriend three times; once when they were both on drugs at Johnny Seiffert’s house on Haight Street on the night of the October War, once at the FBI safe house in Berkeley, and earlier that week after the first meeting of the nascent California Civil Rights Forum at the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco.
That encounter with Darlene Lefebure had been a horribly uncomfortable affair mediated by her Aunt Molly; a classic case of the road to perdition often being paved with good intentions. Darlene had been painfully uncommunicative, torn. Although she was grateful for being taken in by Miranda’s aunt and uncle, and aware that Miranda had done what little she could to help her when she was under FBI supervision, Miranda remained the person she still – at some level - held accountable for ‘stealing her boyfriend’. Miranda had done no such thing of course, but she saw exactly where the slightly younger woman was coming from.
Miranda planned to give her brother Gregory a ring that evening, perhaps he could put her up in his apartment in Sausalito tonight; she would have to make a flying stop at Nob Hill to collect a few of the things from her room at her aunt and uncle’s house – that would be awkward – but nowhere near as awkward as sleeping under the same roof of Darlene Lefebure.
“Have you actually spoken to Darlene, Dwayne?”
The man stared into his coffee cup.
“No. I know I ought to but,” he shrugged his massive shoulders, “heck, what would I say?”
Miranda thought about it.
“Sorry works for most girls?”
The man’s teeth flashed white for a moment as he smiled. He could not help himself smiling.
“Darlene looked really good,” Miranda said aimlessly. “I think Aunt Molly is mothering her to death.”
There was a faraway look in the black man’s eyes.
“What?” Miranda demanded.
“Nothing.”
The woman inclined her face and gave him a quizzical look which knifed through his composure.
“Honestly and truly,” he explained, “every time I come out to the West Coast it’s like coming to another country. It’s hard to explain but it makes me giddy sometimes and I don’t know who I am anymore.” He raised his cup to his lips, decided not to drink, put it down again. “Some places back in Alabama and Mississippi I could get lynched for sitting down in a public place and passing the time with a white woman. Here, well, people look at you sometimes, black and white, but heck, out here at least a man knows most everybody else thinks he’s a human being!”
“Most everybody,” she agreed.
The first time they had met she had had long windblown hair, dressed in kaftans and sandals and she had been to all intents, somebody else. Today her hair was clipped short, almost like a man’s, and she was dressed soberly in dark slacks, and a plain blouse beneath a tailored jacket. Although her outfit had not been designed to minimise her bust and her curves that was exactly the effect it had. Sex kitten to ultra-respectable nine-to-five working woman in a little over a year. Neither of them was the person they were before the war; it was precisely the thing they recognized in the other and possibly, the thing that was drawing them together.
“You and Darlene should sort things out,” Miranda decided, steering the conversation back onto its previous course. It was hopeless and she was tired of the pretence. She had to level with the man. “Look,” she explained, her face suddenly full of the sort of trouble she normally hid from everybody except her Aunt Molly. “After you rang me in Sacramento yesterday and we agreed to meet up again, I got a visit from an attorney.”
Dwayne John had no idea where this was going except that he instinctively knew it was not going towards a good place.
“Yeah...”
“A guy I used to know is in jail in San Bernardino on a murder rap.”
“Okay...”
Miranda launched into the whole story.
How she had fallen out with Sam Brenckmann and talked Johnny Seiffert into signing him up to tour the North West in the middle of winter; out of pure undiluted spite. How she had thought Sam was dead until recently; only to discover he was making a name for himself in the clubs of Los Angeles and his girlfriend was pregnant, the deadly fire at The Troubadour and the way the LAPD had framed him and the owner of the club at the instigation of none other than Johnny Seiffert.
She was breathless by the time she finished and she knew she had garbled parts of the story, totally baffling Dwayne John who badly wanted to know how he could help her.
“You found out about Sam being alive because of the Navy?”
Miranda realized she had missed out huge chunks of the narrative.
“Yes. When Admiral Braithwaite and his wife were murdered in Oakland the local PD screwed up and the Navy wanted to know what was going on. I was the one who got to liaise with the Navy at Alameda; and the guy on their side turned out to be Sam’s brother. Which was weird because when I met him he didn’t look at all like Sam. But anyway, the guy at Alameda really was Sam’s brother and that’s how I found out he was still alive and about the girlfriend in Laurel Canyon and the baby. Walter, Sam’s brother is called Walter. A regular guy, actually. He was hardly fazed at all when we got to the FBI safe house in Berkeley and Darlene and I recognized each other!”
“This was all at the same time you were getting the FBI off my back?”
“It was all around the same time, yes.”
The man contemplated the situation.
“So,” he recapitulated, “you got a visit from Sam Brenckmann’s attorney?”
“Yes, a man called Vincent Meredith. He wanted me to spill the dirt on Johnny.”
“You did, right?”
“Yes. But I haven’t had anything to do with the little shit since that night at Haight Street. After that night I wouldn’t be surprised if Uncle Harvey
or the San Francisco PD put the screws on him to leave me alone. I couldn’t really help, Vincent Meredith. He was very polite but I got the impression he’d do whatever he had to do to get Sam off the hook. Even if it meant dragging me and my family into this thing.”
Miranda felt better for having said it, unfortunately that did not to mitigate the likely consequences of the ensuing scandal. If this thing got nasty she could wave goodbye to her job on the Governor’s staff and her post-war new start would be over. Her parents would probably never speak to her again.
“I’d be angrier,” she admitted, “if it wasn’t all my fault. I almost got Sam killed and he went through Hell last winter because of me!”
Chapter 35
Saturday 11th January 1964
Mercer’s Diner, Fort Worth, Texas
“You ain’t going to give me any of that religious crap you laid on me the last time we met?” The shorter, much younger man checked as he joined the craggy, granite-jawed cowboy in the alcove at the back of the diner off Commerce Street. The joint was filling up with mid-day business and outside, despite the season, the Sun beat down and dust hung in the air. Fort Worth and the nearby big city, Dallas, had not been as hard hit by the post-war recession as a lot of places and the diner’s clients were of the well-fed, complacent sort that tended to irritate the twenty-four year old former Marine.