by James Philip
“It ain’t just here, brother.”
“No. We’re the lucky ones, I suppose.”
The men parted at the intersection of Gough Street and Sutter Street.
The big man did not watch Terry Francois’s retreating back as he turned on his heel and retraced his steps back towards Geary Boulevard. This was the fourth time he had been back to San Francisco since the night of the October War. So much had happened in the intervening thirteen months he thought of his old, pre-war self as a stranger, a man he had never really known that well. His former self had been a wastrel, a dreamer and often he wondered what had happened to him.
Mostly, he was guilty because he hardly ever asked himself what had become of Darlene. She had disappeared the night of the war; the night he hooked up with that crazy blond bitch at Johnny Seiffert’s party. That had been a wild night! It was only when he was outside on the kerb, his head still speeding, with no pants on that he had got his shit together in a hurry, dodging the SFPD cruisers he had watched bundling the blond bitch...
They had never gotten onto first name terms but she was something! Or maybe he was imaging that. But for the war he might have gone back to talk to that prick Johnny Seiffert. The little shit owed him money for studio sessions going back months; that was the only reason him and Darlene had had to hang out at his pad in the first place.
Oh, Lord! That was a night!
That was the night that had taught him that there was nothing capable of bringing a sinner back to the faith faster, than being thrown out on the street with his pecker flapping in the wind by a crazy guy waving a Navy Colt on the night the World blew itself up. A couple of days later he had re-found his Christian soul; and vowed to be a good man again. He still did not know if he was born again; or a good man but he was as sure as Hell penitent!
That night of the war he had walked, well, stumbled mostly north up Masonic Avenue. The people at St Agnes’s Church had literally pulled him in off the street as a SFPD cruiser drew up alongside him while he was puking up his guts up on the street. He was not any kind of Catholic; he had been brought up a Baptist by folks who did not see the point of saving the rod. The folks at St Agnes’s – white, Hispanic, and black – had not cared if he was Catholic or what the colour of the skin was, in his hour of need they had simply taken him in and done their best to keep him safe from evil.
That morning after the war he had still not learned what kind of Christian he was; that was a thing he had had to work out for himself later. Good people had taken him in that night. He had lost his faith and now he was re-found, re-formed and re-made in the image of the man his Ma and Pa – God bless their begotten souls – should have been proud of.
Nonetheless, he still felt really bad about Darlene.
Not least because he missed her so much it physically hurt...
Dwayne very nearly jumped out of his skin when the police siren blared right next to his shoulder and the blue and white SFPD cruiser squealed to a halt beside him.
The big man stuck his hands in the air without having to wait to be told ‘let me see you hands, boy’ even before he saw the two dudes in the tell tale badly tailored mid-1950s dark suits and funeral ties, white shirts and lovingly buffed black shoes clambering out of the 1959 Lincoln parked further down the street.
Dwayne John found himself reflecting that it was no coincidence that God had chosen a moment when he was beset by guilt over how badly he had let down Darlene, to remind how him how easily pride went before a man’s fall.
Chapter 7
Monday 25th November 1963
Department of Justice Building
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC
Gretchen Betancourt had learned three things about the Department of Justice in the five months she had been a junior assistant counsel to the Office of the United States Deputy Attorney General.
Firstly, that Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, the Attorney General, was too busy ‘counselling’ his big brother, the President, and too often on the road on campaigning and other ill-defined ‘non-departmental missions’ to be able to do his job properly.
Secondly, that the motto of the Department of Justice - Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur – was very bad Latin and nobody could agree what it meant, or was supposed to mean.
Thirdly, that the man that she actually worked for – forty-one year old Nicholas deBelleville ‘Nick’ Katzenbach - was actually the very real power behind the throne at the Department of Justice.
Gretchen had come to Washington in the spring intending to seek an internship on the senatorial staff of one of her mother’s uncles; but soon realised that a job on Capitol Hill was simply an exercise in picking off the lowest hanging fruit. Rather than rush into a decision she had started going to the right parties, getting herself invited to the right receptions, being seen in the right circles, and cultivated a number of new and potentially very useful acquaintances around the fringes of the Democratic National Committee. There was never any shortage of self-important middle-aged and elder men in DC yearning to have their egos massaged and to be seen in public with a well-connected attractive younger woman. Especially, when that well-connected attractive younger woman in question was Claude Betancourt’s daughter; and famously, known to be the singular apple of the old rogue’s eye.
Sure enough, after a few weeks the offers of interviews for various positions had materialised. Once she had sorted the wheat from the chaff, and worked out which posts were only available if she slept with somebody she did not want to sleep with, the opportunity at the Department of Justice had seemed perfect. In fact it had seemed far too good to be true. If the offer had come from Bobby Kennedy’s Office she would probably have politely declined it; her father had warned her that there ‘were always strings’ when you made a contract with ‘the Kennedy boys’. Her father was old-fashioned, and although something of a snob, it had not stopped him becoming an indispensible litigator and key associate of his contemporary old Joe Kennedy, the scion of the Kennedy clan who had passed away last December within weeks of the October War. Notwithstanding his closeness to the father, he had always kept the Kennedy sons at arm’s length as if he was unable to make up his mind what they stood for. It was not that he disliked either Jack or Bobby, just that he did not understand them and therefore, he honestly did not know what a deal with either of them was worth. Besides, a few years ago he had had his fingers burned when a case involving one of the ‘old bootlegger’s’ former confederates had come out of the woodwork and cost him, and several of his best clients a lot of money. Gretchen’s father was not the sort of man who forgot a slight or a setback even though he had remained on friendly terms with Joe Kennedy until his death; and at the funeral of his old friend Gretchen could have sworn she had seen a tear in her father’s eye.
‘There is no such thing as just business in real life,’ he would prognosticate at the dinner table, ‘if it isn’t personal one obviously isn’t taking it seriously enough!’
All that morning Gretchen had been reading, with meticulous attention to detail, the three files delivered to her second floor office by a pair of Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agents at nine o’clock on the dot. Before the G-men departed she had signed several reams of receipts, non-disclosure undertakings and brutally unambiguous statements detailing what she could expect to happen to her if she spoke or alluded to – inadvertently or otherwise - the contents of the files outside the walls of the Department of Justice.
Gretchen had acquired a secretary whom she shared with an earnest young attorney called Barry Samsom – he was actually a small, bespectacled one hundred and twenty pound weakling likely to blow away in a strong wind rather than a reincarnation of any kind of re-incarnated Biblical strongman – but by sheer power of personality, she had quickly appropriated their shared secretary to work for her full time.
Gretchen’s secretary, a petite blond college girl engaged to a staffer at the Main Navy and Munitions Building on Constitution Aven
ue, had brought her a mid-morning coffee, black and strong the way she liked it, about half-an-hour ago. Her coffee had grown cold by the time she finally put down the file she was re-reading and got around to sipping her drink.
Given that she was the daughter of an old and very wealthy New England family, and that she belonged to the sixth or seventh generation of the family to ply its fortunes in the practice of law, Gretchen was, unsurprisingly, a political and social conservative inherently committed to the ongoing smooth functioning of the organs of the State responsible for the safety of civil society. She belonged to that particular section of the populous who had never been in trouble with the police, did not know anybody who had been and basically, mainly because she had never had any serious contact with them, she tended to place an innate trust in the people judicially authorised to keep that peace. This meant that she had come to the Department of Justice pre-disposed to trust in the integrity of pillars of the State like the Secret Service and the FBI in upholding the law and to invariably, mostly infallibly, to act in the best interests of, when it came down to the bottom line, people exactly like her. The trouble was that every time files like the ones in front of her now came across her desk a fresh canker of doubt stirred, and like an onion, grew another skin. In recent weeks the canker had grown from the dimensions of a tiny acorn to those of a fully inflated basket ball.
Gretchen put down her cup and rose from her chair to stretch her legs. Her window overlooked Pennsylvania Avenue and although she had never attempted it – dignity permitted of no such schoolgirl excess – she suspected that if she leaned far enough out of the window she could see all the way up the street to Capitol Hill.
Whenever she stared out across Washington, seemingly wholly unsullied by the October War, she felt a little guilty. Sometimes, she even thought about the night of the war and the morning after the war that she had spent with Dan Brenckmann at her parents’ hideaway at Wethersfield, Connecticut. They had tried to get back to Boston but it was impossible, all the roads were closed or jammed with traffic. Eventually, they had gone their separate ways. She had not got back to half-wrecked Boston until a fortnight later.
Where the town of Quincy, in which she had planned to commence her brilliant legal career had stood there was nothing. The town and its seventy thousand inhabitants no longer existed, although the street plan was visible in places, everything else was flattened and scorched. In the naval dockyards on the Weymouth Fore River several big grey warships had sunk, their superstructures scorched and malformed in their flooded docks and alongside fire-blackened wharves. It was as if a giant blow torch had been applied to the land for miles around. Weymouth in the south west, Braintree to the south, and Milton to the west were all shattered ghost towns. The blasted, burned zone reached north along the coast towards the heart of Boston, the southern suburbs as far north as Brookline were scourged by the flames. Blinking survivors – thousands were blinded or left with irreparable retinal damage – poked pathetically around the periphery of the ‘dead zones’. Somewhere in the devastation her family home in the hills behind Quincy where she had grown up had been consumed by the fifty million degree fireball of the warhead which had overshot its target, Boston, by just enough miles to kill tens rather than hundreds of thousands of Americans. On the other side of Boston, at Cambridge situated virtually up against the fence of the more or less intact Massachusetts Institute of Technology Campus, Dan Brenckmann’s mother and father had sat out the war in their basement. The Brenckmann’s house had lost all its windows, some slates off its roof, and a falling tree had totalled Dan Brenckmann’s Ma’s station wagon, otherwise they had emerged unhurt in the morning. Not so Dan’s kid sister, Tabatha. She had been in Buffalo...
There was a knock at the office door.
“Can I come in, Gretchen?” Barry Samsom asked with unabashed trepidation. “My chief told me I need to have sight of the files those G-men brought over this morning.”
Gretchen was a little irritated that the pathetic little man had disturbed her train of thought.
“I’ll be finished with them by one o’clock.” She scowled. “I can’t allow you to take them out of this room.”
“Oh, I know the FBI is a bit one-eyed over these things but...”
“The files were signed over to me, Barry,” Gretchen retorted primly. “If I leave the room they must be locked in my desk and the door to the office locked.”
“I know,” the man protested. “But we’re the ones who are supposed to be in charge of the FBI, Gretchen. Not vice versa.”
“Do you want to explain that to Director Hoover, or shall I?”
The man stamped out of the office muttering under his breath without bothering to shut the door behind him. Briefly, Gretchen contemplated drafting a formal complaint; she had after all just been invited to break departmental rules and treated with gratuitous disrespect by a male colleague. No, she decided, the little runt was not worth it. Besides, the Barry Samsoms of this World were no threat to her. She shut her office door she went back to the window.
Her father was a dear man even though as he got older he was tending to be overly loquacious and opinionated and very stuck in his ways, even for an old lawyer. He loved to quote from the classics – Homer and Hippocrates, for he would much rather have been a scholar of antiquity than a ‘dealer in the minutiae of modern times’ as a ludicrously expensive litigator and Democrat Party fixer par excellence – and he constantly bombarded his family with ancient saws and pithily amended or adapted ancient and modern literary aphorisms.
‘Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience deceptive, judgment difficult,’ he might quote from Hippocrates, and then, with a twinkle in his eye add, ‘and how often the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry...’
Gretchen could not help but wonder what her father would make of the material in the files on her desk.
It seemed to her – forgetting her moral qualms, just on a purely intellectual level – that the Kennedy Administration’s stance on civil rights was an object lesson in the essential dysfunctionality within the Washington DC bubble. On the one hand Gretchen worked for a government that was tentatively reaching out its hand in friendship to that part of the Civil Rights movement most closely aligned to Dr Martin Luther King junior; while at the same time reconciling itself with relying on the ongoing support of the positively anti-diluvium, segregationist rump of the old Southern Democratic wing of its own party in Congress. Worse, it seemed reconciled with one wing of the government, the Federal Bureau of Investigation - an organisation supposedly subordinate to, and therefore answerable to the Department of Justice - actively and systematically undermining and suborning everything the Kennedy Administration had been trying to achieve in the South. Director J. Edgar Hoover – or as the younger generation in the Department of Justice whispered, when referring to the supposedly legendary crime fighter, ‘that old faggot’ – seemed hopelessly locked into a 1920s mindset, and his boss, United States Attorney General Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy, the President’s brother, seemed unable or unwilling to do anything about it.
What with one thing and another for all its small ‘c’ conservatism in the aftermath of the October War, Gretchen’s generation would never again trust the ‘men at the top’ to keep them safe from all evil. The war had changed the psyche of the whole nation, no more so than within that part of the population which had lost the most; the youth of America for whom the American Dream had turned into a mildly radioactive myth that night thirteen months ago. The days when the President, great industrialists, or men like J. Edgar Hoover could get away with ‘trust me, I know what I am doing’ were over. Things would never be the same again even if the Director of the FBI did not know it yet.
Gretchen had met Bobby Kennedy several times that fall. The Attorney General had looked her up and down like a lump of meat the first couple of times; in precisely the way her own boss, Deputy United States Attorney General Katzenbach had not. They said the Pr
esident was a changed man since the war. They said he was unmanned by the cataclysm; that the runaway libido of former times not so much curbed but banished by the prophylactic existential experience of the war. His younger brother, seven years JFK’s junior, and possibly less burdened by his personal culpability in that night’s work, had apparently, begun to recover his former appetites and tentatively resumed his former philandering. From what she had heard he was naturally less predatory than his elder sibling and only periodically rapacious.
It was academic, anyway. Gretchen had absolutely no intention of sleeping with a man so intimately implicated in last year’s debacle. The Kennedy brothers might have done what they did for the best possible reasons. They might have had no choice; but a girl had to draw the line somewhere and sleeping with men who had killed so many millions of innocent people was where she drew her personal line, regardless of whether or not it was going to blight her future career because she knew, deep down, that if she surrendered her carefully guarded virginity to the wrong man she would never be clean again afterwards.