by James Philip
Dwayne had described the plans for the procession starting from outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue. Dr King would lead the way accompanied and flanked by civic and religious leaders up Jackson Avenue north to the seventeen acre park in the Fourth Ward of the city. Bedford-Pine Park had been created from the open area left by the Great Atlanta fire of 1917, now it was an island of greenery in the middle of a growing urban, commercial and industrial sprawl.
The Atlanta PD was worried because the park was overlooked on three sides and it claimed did not have enough officers to provide a continuous cordon around it. The police had also voiced concerns about the park’s paucity – more correctly the ‘absence’ - of public facilities given the size of the crowd anticipated in the park, the problems of general crowd control, the inevitable blocking of adjacent roads and issues around access for emergency vehicles; fire wagons, ambulances and for the police themselves in the event of some accident occurring or emergency arising during the rally.
The people around Dr King were largely deaf to the Atlanta Police Department’s pleas; they had heard it all before and no such concerns were ever raised in connection with the crowds at football or ball games, or at parades on Independence Day or other festivals when the majority of the participants were likely to be white.
Dwayne John was a little uncomfortable about the arrangements, especially those in Bedford-Pine Park where Dr King would be in one place – on the raised and relatively exposed open stage – for the best part of an hour while he and the preceding keynote speakers addressed the crowd. Moreover, while there would be a number of police officers in the park, mostly around the stage, none of Dr King’s bodyguards – of whom he was one – was armed.
Talking again to Miranda had taken the edge off his unease.
Talking to Miranda had made him mellow.
That was yesterday; today he was standing in the empty park eying the surrounding buildings trying to convince himself that he was worrying about nothing.
‘I miss you, Dwayne,’ she had said and he had ached to wrap her in his arms. In that moment all the unspoken worries about how the people around them might view their friendship if publicly it was ever acknowledged to be something more, came into sharp focus but oddly he did not care and in his heart, he knew that she felt exactly the same way.
Maybe, back on the West Coast things would be easier, simpler for them.
However, that was a thing for the future.
Today he was thinking about Friday afternoon’s rally.
Chapter 65
Thursday 6th February 1964
Gretsky’s, Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles
When Sabrina Henschal had welcomed Sam Brenckmann back to Gretsky’s he had been in a bad way; much as he and Judy had been after they escaped the North West after the war. It had been an exhaustingly emotional day and every time she thought about it she very nearly shed a tear even now, a fortnight later. Judy had been beside herself, Sabrina had been as bad and between them they had almost crushed the life out of Sam as they had cried over him.
For the sake of propriety Sabrina had tried very hard to keep her hands off Sam in the days since; but it was not easy. Sam had been special to her from the first day she laid eyes on him; and after the first flush of lust and infatuation had passed their relationship had morphed into something little brother-big sisterly. By the time Miranda Sullivan had lured the poor, gullible boy up to San Francisco and allowed that bastard Johnny Seiffert to get his claws into him Sabrina’s feelings had, although she hated to admit it, turned positively maternal towards Sam. Sam was one of those lovely guys who needed a strong woman to protect him and the last couple of weeks she had just wanted to hug him forever.
Judy was not the jealous, possessive type. However, Sabrina would have put one of her own eyes out with a stick rather than do anything liable to make Judy suspect, for a moment, that she was trying to muscle in on her and Sam. That was not what Sabrina was about.
All she wanted was for Sam to be safe.
Sabrina was getting soft in her old age; that was what it was. That probably explained why she was finding it increasingly hard to raise any great ire about Miranda. The ‘bitch’ had put everything on the line to bust Sam out of that concentration camp at San Bernardino...
That morning Sabrina was awakened by Tabatha.
Not quite two months old and oblivious to the craziness of the last few weeks her ‘goddaughter’ – how weird did that sound? – wanted her breakfast and by the smell of things, cleaning too. Sabrina had the baby in her room every second or third night because both Sam and Judy needed their sleep; and selfishly, she completely adored Tabatha much like any doting grandparent would.
While Judy had not been bothered about getting married; she had needed for Tabatha to be baptized. Both objects had been achieved two afternoons ago in a small Lutheran chapel off Santa Monica Boulevard. Judy had gone quietly religious lately, remembering her childhood church-going days. Sabrina had assumed it was her friend’s way of coping but actually her faith was deep if not loudly proclaimed.
Sabrina squinted myopically at the clock.
It was horribly early and one day she would have a stern talk to Tabatha Christa Brenckmann about what time a girl ought to start her day. Nevertheless, Sabrina pulled on a shift, gathered up the squalling infant and carried her downstairs, cooing and humming reassuringly all the way. While she warmed baby formula in a pan with a wrinkling nose, she replaced Tabatha’s diaper. Thereafter, she ambled about the old house feeding her goddaughter, rocking her tenderly. Later, with winding – Tabatha invariably burped healthily – successfully achieved she took the baby back to bed.
Hopefully, Tabatha would sleep a couple of hours before she had to surrender her back to her mother; at which point the best part of her day would be over. It was all very strange. She had not spoken to her own kids for years. Now and then pictures arrived in the post, with explanatory brief notes attached. She had two grandchildren in New Mexico, boys, for whom she felt absolutely nothing and yet she was totally connected with Sam and Judy – she loved them to death – and Tabatha was her soul grandchild.
The baby gurgled in her arms in the big bed.
Breakfast at Gretsky’s happened all morning and sometimes the afternoon, also. Judy was still half-asleep at ten when she joined Sabrina in the kitchen.
The two women exchanged kisses.
“I gave her a second small feed about twenty minutes ago,” Sabrina whispered, desperate not to rouse the sleeping baby in the big wicker basket on the long oak table at the center of the room.
July paused to gaze awhile at her daughter.
“Sam said Doug was coming over later today?” She asked presently, with a resigned murmur.
“He says the guys from Columbia are advancing him a ‘starter loan’, or something, that will let him start rebuilding The Troubadour.”
Judy tried not to frown. ‘The guys from Columbia’ already owned a large piece of Sam and they probably believed he was going to be in their pocket forever. Or at least until the World blew itself up again. She honestly did not know whether to love or hate Doug Weston, the beanpole, outlandish, manic club owner and would be promoter to whom Sam was, albeit guardedly, devoted much in the fashion of a sibling with a crazy older brother who has been disowned by the rest of his family.
Sabrina had been even more suspicious about Doug Weston before she had discovered Doug had got himself on a murder rap on account of having shot a biker who was about to brain Sam with a chain. After he had got out of the penitentiary at Irvine, Doug had hung out at Gretsky’s for a few days.
The older woman was aware of her friend’s wry look.
“What?” She protested mildly, mouthing rather than voicing the retort.
“Nothing.”
Sabrina huffed. “I can’t help it if a guy gets the wrong idea about me.”
Judy smiled.
Nothing that had happened that night The Troubadour burned down, or
since, had driven Sam and Doug Weston so much as a fraction of an inch apart. The two men, so different in temperament and ambition, the one driven the other quietly content to walk his path in the world, were like two sides of the same coin. Even Sabrina had accepted that Sam and Doug Weston were out to conquer the world together, or not at all.
When Doug was around it was not that Sabrina was not herself, just that she was somehow more herself. The pair were not lovers, or Judy did not think they were. It was not really a sexual thing; not yet, nor perhaps would it be in future. No, the pair of them sparked off each other, not opposites attracting so much as alternately repelling and attracting each other. They would be completely at cross-purposes and the next moment, utterly at one, although never for very long.
“Sam says the guys from Columbia won’t put up more than seed-corn money to rebuild The Troubadour unless he signs over future royalties and somebody else guarantees the loan?” Judy put to her friend, softly without a hint of concern despite the angst roiling in the pit of her stomach.
“How does Sam feel about that?” Sabrina answered a question with another.
“Sam says it is only money,” Judy sighed. “And he wouldn’t be around now if Doug hadn’t shot that biker.”
Sabrina nodded.
“That’s pretty much the way I see it, too,” she whispered.
Tabatha stirred and both women instantly turned their heads to the basket on the table and held their breath.
“That’s what I reckoned,” Judy grimaced, meeting her best friend’s eye. “I guessed that was why Doug was coming over today.”
Sabrina nodded.
“Gretsky’s isn’t worth that much but the land we’re standing on is prime real estate,” she explained, telling Judy what she already knew. “Doug’s had the papers drawn up. I’ll sign on the dotted line and we’ll have the collateral we need to start rebuilding the club. Doug, Me, Sam and you will each own one fourth of the New Troubadour at 9081 Santa Monica Boulevard!”
Judy’s mouth opened in surprise.
It had never occurred to her that she would be so intimately tied into ‘the business’.
She would have started asking questions if Tabatha had not chosen that moment to bawl for her motherly attentions.
Chapter 66
Friday 7th February 1964
Strategic Air Command Headquarters, Offutt Air Force Base, Omaha, Nebraska
DEFCON 2: code name ‘COCKED PISTOL’ requiring the armed forces of the United States of America to come to six hours notice to wage nuclear war. All around him the Headquarters of Strategic Air Command was readying for war and incredibly, unbelievably, Major Nathan Zabriski was standing outside the door of an Air Force shrink!
He knocked at the door.
“Come!”
Nathan was a little surprised to be confronted by a slim, middle-aged, greying woman dressed in a dark civilian trouser suit.
“I’m Professor Caroline Konstantis from the School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. Or rather, I was a fellow at that august institution until October 27th nineteen sixty-two. I hold the honorary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Air Force but I very rarely wear the uniform; it makes me look old and very severe.”
The woman stuck out her right hand.
Nathan Zabriski had opened his mouth to speak but the civilian spoke again before he could form a sensible reply.
“What on earth is going on around here?” She demanded ruefully. “Just after I arrived on the base alarms started going off and I was marched into this dreadful little cupboard?”
The man looked around for the first time.
The ‘dreadful little cupboard’ was in fact a regular interview room attached to the Personnel Wing of the Headquarters. Windowless, equipped with four hard chairs, a utilitarian table on which a black Bakelite telephone handset rested, and lit with two overhead, part-shaded lights, ‘dreadful’ did the environment an injustice.
Nathan blinked, collected his faculties.
“The alert level has been raised to one level short of war, Ma’am,” he reported. ‘I don’t know the whole story but the USS Enterprise and the USS Long Beach were attacked with nuclear weapons several hours ago somewhere south of Malta in the Central Mediterranean. There’s some suggestion that there have been other ‘nuclear incidents’ in the Mediterranean but that intelligence is way above my pay grade.”
“Oh,” Professor Konstantis digested this news with a mildly vexed forbearance. “Are we about to retaliate?”
“I don’t know, Ma’am.”
The man and the woman had shaken hands perfunctorily.
“Let’s sit down,” Caroline Konstantis decided.
To the man’s surprise the woman sat in one of the chairs on his side of the desk.
“From my colleagues’ reports of their sessions with you I recollect that while you were in captivity on Malta,” she began as they settled, “you were befriended by a young Maltese woman?”
“Marija Calleja,” Nathan muttered, sitting stiffly upright in his chair. Prior to today he had attended four ‘sessions’ with senior Air Force shrinks. The idiots had wanted him to talk about the night of the Cuban Missiles War and the Malta nightmare, to externalise his existential angst about the way he and his dead comrades of the 100th Bomb Group had been duped into attacking a ‘friendly power’. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about or to re-live any of it. “Miss Calleja was appointed by the British as a sort of independent person, you know, like the Swiss Red Cross, to make sure no harm came to any of us although, I can’t remember a single incident of anybody on Malta threatening any of us. As for us being in ‘captivity’, when the Brits found out we’d been as betrayed as they had been, well, once they’d stopped being angry they were sort of sorry for us. I think at the beginning some of the guys thought the Brits would take us out and shoot us all, but once Marija appeared we stopped worrying about that stuff.”
“Do you think about her a lot, Nathan?”
“I guess I do,” he confessed, not quite sure how the woman had broken down his defenses so easily or so completely.
“Have you tried to get back in contact with her?”
“No, she was crazy about this guy she’d been writing to half her life who was on a destroyer headed for Malta.” Nathan had re-ordered his wits. “The other doctors wrote down what I said and took lots of notes?”
“I’m not like other doctors,” the woman shrugged. “If a big bomb drops anywhere near the base how much would we know about it?”
“Nothing, probably.”
Caroline Konstantis nodded.
“My colleagues tell me that you are dead set on returning to flying duties, Nathan?”
“That would be correct, Ma’am.”
“Why?”
“Er, I don’t understand?”
“You’ve flown and survived two suicide missions, Major Zabriski,” the woman put to him, frowning. “What do you think you have to prove?”
“I bombed our allies...”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“My goddam mother shot the British Prime Minister and tried to murder the President!”
“Nobody thinks that was your fault, either. In this country, thank God, we don’t hold the child responsible for the sins of the father, or in this case, the mother. Goodness gracious, General LeMay personally welcomed you back onto American soil and has repeatedly, publicly and privately described you and your comrades in the Bloody 100th as ‘heroes’! I ask again; what do you think you have to prove?”
Nathan bristled with indignation.
“Being heroic in the wrong cause doesn’t cut it!”
The woman contemplated this, nodding slowly.
Although nominally attached to General LeMay’s personal staff since returning to the United States, Nathan had actually been posted to a desk in Nebraska in the middle of the winter. He had been promoted, his service file noted with a glowing commendation for gallantry by LeMay, and he had been as
signed a position in the Intelligence Division at Offutt Air Base. It went without saying that he was forbidden to speak to ‘unauthorized personnel’ about his experiences, not that he wanted to talk to anybody about it.
At Offutt he was respectfully shunned by all and sundry.
He would have been bitter about it; but he would have ostracized himself too if he had been in the other guys’ boots.
“You’re a bright young man, Nathan,” Caroline Konstantis said. “You know the Air Force is never going to restore your operational status.”
“With respect, Ma’am,” he said stolidly, “until I see that in writing from the Air Force Department I know no such thing.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you why, politics aside, the Air Force will never let you fly again,” the woman returned unapologetically. “One, it is an established principle of command that one does not ask a man to do more than one can reasonably expect of him. Two, the safe and efficient discharge of operational flying duties requires teamwork of the highest standard, inherent in which is the absolute trust of each and every member of a given team in the other members of the aforementioned team. Three, since your return to the United States you have been treated like a pariah by your fellows; this must have been intolerable and you have deported yourself with extraordinary self-control and dignity but while you remain in the service this is not going to get any better. Two and three above mitigate against any return to operational status. Do you want me to go on I’ve got a list as long as my arm?”
Nathan shook his head.
“So that’s it?” He grunted wearily.
“No,” the woman smiled. “This is hard for you. The Air Force was your family; now it is not. But you are a young man with his life in front of him. The future is what you make it, Nathan.”