by Gini Koch
John—
I’m going to go to the University. Stay here and see what you can see. Keep an eye on the Panthers. I think one of them may be some kind of informant. Keep your eyes and ears open.
I WENT INTO the room and found Fred, asked him if he remembered me from Spanish Harlem. He said he did, but he looked completely worn out. “Look, I’m a qualified medic. I’d be happy to lend a hand in your free clinic if you’d like.”
“Sure thing, man. It’s down the street a couple of blocks. Talk to that sister over there. She’ll take you over. She’s a nurse.”
“Maybe you should come, too. You look like you’re about to faint.”
“No, man, I’m okay. I just got a lot on my mind, you know. Got this appeal thing to worry about, got a baby coming in three months. Then there’s the whole overthrowing the capitalist system and fomenting a revolution, redistributing all the power and the wealth to the people. You know.” Fred’s smile erased the pain from his face for half a second, and I realized I quite liked him.
“You’ve been eating prison food, right? Why don’t you come down to the clinic, I can look at your bloods. You might just need a supplement, or maybe a couple of day’s rest. Here, hold on, step over here, those guys are trying to get through with a ladder.”
A white guy with a brown shirt and a Confederate flag patch on it passed through, working with a man in Black Panther uniform. He looked me up and down, and spoke to me in a thick Southern accent, skipping over his consonants and extending his vowels.
“What’s the matter, son? You never seen no white boy working hand-in-hand with a negro before? These are some honorable blacks, here. Good people. Chairman Fred, there, he showed us how we were all pissed off at the nig—er, blacks and browns and whatever, we should’ve been fighting with the men in their suits downtown. Fight the power, power to the people.”
Fred smiled and shook his head. “Maybe I should come with you. Seems like I’m just in the way of the people here. William! Over here. We’re gonna go on down to the clinic... What’s your name?”
“John Watson. They call me Doc, mostly.”
“Doc, this is William. He’s in charge of security. He’ll keep an eye on me, make sure I ain’t going to go get killed or nothing.”
I remembered William. The tall, skinny black man who had stood in the corner on that hot June night and watched everything. He made me uneasy then, and he didn’t make me feel any better now. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
We’d got to the clinic. “This here is Janelle. She’s a powerful sister with a needle and thread. If she was a white man, she’d be a surgeon.”
“Hello, Doc. Pleased to meet you. Can I get your blood type and are you allergic to anything, please?”
I hadn’t been asked for my blood since I had been in country. “What for?”
Fred spoke up. “Anyone working here, we keep records on everyone, just in case anything happens to them. Better forearmed in case we don’t get forewarned, know what I mean?”
I looked over the holes in the walls of the Panther offices and the spent shell casings in the street as we left. I did know what he meant. “A-negative. NKDA.”
THE CLINIC WAS small, but well laid out. There were a few people there, waiting to be seen. And Fred wouldn’t let me examine him until we’d looked over the ‘people,’ particularly the children.
There wasn’t anything especially wrong. The first patient was a kid, maybe twelve, with lacerations on his hands from a rusty fence. We didn’t have records of his vaccinations or anything, so we gave him a tetanus booster and cleaned it up well.
Janelle was, as Fred said, excellent. If I’d had her in Vietnam, I’d have put her in charge of the nurses, if not recommended her to be sent for medical training, although of course the Army doesn’t work that way. I couldn’t imagine a ‘negro officer’ in command anywhere except in the front lines. She was more than up to the task of running anything that came through the door that day, and I told Fred.
“I know. She should be a doctor herself, maybe a famous surgeon. We told her we’d send her to medical school, but she said no way. ‘Five years away from the people wouldn’t do nobody no good, now would it?’ is what she said. Made me proud, man, of what we’re building down here. Still, it’s short-term. I start to worry about the bigger movement. What we’re gonna do when the revolution comes, you know? We’re gonna need revolutionary surgeons and engineers just as much as pipe-fitters and academics. Hard to think that far ahead when we got the pigs coming by and shooting at us every couple of weeks.”
There was something infectious about Fred Hampton. I had trouble explaining it, but I found myself imagining the future right along with him. “The Declaration of Independence was 1776. The constitution wasn’t ratified till 1789. Thirteen years. Some of that was wartime, but it took a while. You’ve got time.”
“We’re not no American Revolution, though. Rich white men landowners fighting to create their own country where they could go on being white landowners. A system built on slavery and oppression. A capitalist, oppressive system built on the backs of the people. No, Doc, the revolution has to be built up carefully, it has to be a people’s revolution, shifting power to the people where it belongs.”
“I never thought about it that way, you know. I should be ashamed.”
“No, man. No reason why you should be ashamed. The people have been made to feel ashamed for being ignorant for centuries. Ignorance just means you ain’t found something out yet. Einstein was ignorant before he developed that bomb. Little children are ignorant before we teach them to read. You never had a reason to think about the revolution like that. Better to think about the coming revolution than glorifying the ones in the past, though.”
“Hold on there, Fred. Your eyes are drooping. Nurse Janelle, could I have that flashlight please? Here, follow the light.” I started to examine him. “Dehydrated. You need to drink more water and less coffee. Look at your nails, here. See how they’re all grooved and brittle? More iron in your diet. Nurse Janelle?”
“Sister Janelle, or just Janelle, please.”
“You earned that title, I’m going to give it to you. Sorry to make you run around like this. Have you got any IV iron supplement?”
“We had some. May have used it all on some pregnant sisters. I’ll check.”
“Fred, you need to get more iron in your diet. That’ll probably do it. Get a bit of rest for a couple of days. Eat stuff like liver, beef, oysters. Beans and greens are good, too. How much do you sleep at night?”
“Man, I don’t even know. You’re not going to get me to sleep much more, though, Doc. I’ll try to get some better food. Drink more water and stuff. The revolution ain’t gonna come if we sleep in every day.”
“Okay, Fred. You eat better, and try to get a little more sleep. It’s not just about you: an army can’t march if they’re sleeping or tired. I saw enough young men ruined from lack of sleep in country. You’re a leader. You can die serving the people, but if you fall asleep before you make it to the battlefield, it won’t be of any use to anyone. Now, where’s your blood fridge? A-negative is pretty useful. I could give you a unit if you like. I gave enough blood in the Army to bleed myself dry a few times. I suppose a pint here couldn’t hurt. What do you think, William? You up for a donation?”
William looks at me from his chair next to the door. “I ain’t so big on needles, Doc, but you go ahead on and bleed yourself out for the people.”
eleven
A WEEK
I SPENT A week in that clinic, patching up burnt hands and treating dehydration and malnutrition. Kids told me how much they liked their free breakfast, which was back the next Monday. A group of people went out and came back with huge boxes of cereal and oatmeal, and then a whole shopping cart filled with bottles of milk. The upstairs was barely swept out and it was already being filled up with food.
I think some of Sherlock’s lessons may have been making an impression. I wasn’t just seeing
people come through, I was noticing the money changing hands. People were leaving coins and notes for the Black Panthers, which must have been what was paying for the medicines and gauze I was using, and the food disappearing into the children’s bellies. People were bringing sheets of wood and cans of paint, too.
Sherlock would disappear every morning, leaving like a man on his way to work, and coming home in the evening. He didn’t talk about what he did during the day.
“You remember Solon, John? ‘Count no man happy till the end is known’? It’s the same with investigation. We mustn’t draw conclusions with partial information. A few more days. We’ll talk through what we’ve found out on the train back to New York.”
That was it, for a week. We were staying in a cramped apartment that was part ammo dump, part meeting hall, and part sleeping den. They gave us a room, and Fred shushed several people who started to ask about the sleeping arrangements. “Ain’t no business of yours, now is it? Besides, it ain’t like there’s a whole lot of spare rooms going. Two men big enough to share a bed. Ain’t like none of us wouldn’t, neither.”
It was nice, doing something with my medical education. I’d spent half a year just trying to make ends meet in New York, before I lucked into the gig with the Factory. We didn’t really know about PTSD then, and if anyone brought up the war, we got to hear about how much worse it had been for our fathers and grandfathers, in Korea and the Pacific and the trenches. I didn’t know what those guys that I sewed back together were going through, but most of what I remembered was malaria, mosquitoes, and blood. All for what, for the pride of something or other? Dominoes. I was starting to see the Black Panthers’ point. Using my hands, doing something, day after day, was a good thing. I could wash up in the morning, and at night, and go to sleep and sleep the sleep of the just, for the first time in a long time.
“YOU KNOW WHAT I’m going to miss, Sherlock? The sky. Did you notice? The buildings are all lower, and you’re not in perpetual shadow like you are in New York.”
“It’s too slow, John. I’m not sure we could survive outside of New York.”
“No, I don’t know what I’d do without the incessant buzz, but it is nice to see the sky, one without helicopters riddled with bullet holes buzzing around it and so much goddamn blood.”
Sherlock looked at me, and I could see his mind searching for the right thing to say. “Looking at the sky is a distraction, John. You miss what’s right there on the ground in front of you.”
The train rocked back and forth, crawling its way along the rails north of Washington DC. We’d spent another night onboard, resting and waiting for the other to speak first.
“Okay, John. What did you find out?”
“I spent a week taking care of people, Sherlock. It was good. I felt useful, and useful to something that mattered. My hands didn’t shake. I’m not sure I’d want to do surgery again, but wrapping up burn victims, stitching cuts, giving tetanus injections to children? That was good.”
“I don’t mean about your feelings, John. What did you see? I hoped you noticed something, some important detail. For instance I noticed that the guns in the apartment we stayed in were kept unloaded, except for the guard who sat up at the front. That the back door led to a blind alley, so it would be easy to trap people in the apartment. That despite the Panthers having plenty of pistols, no one, not even William, the head of security, carried one as a matter of course. That’s the arms discipline. What did you see? And more importantly, what did you observe?”
I watched a small town pass by. A boy in a striped vest, waving out of the back of his house. I wondered if he had floorboards, or a floor open to the dirt below. “Malnutrition. The free breakfast is a genius idea. Children going to school need glucose in their brains. It’s not enough, though. There’s iron deficiency everywhere. The people there are eating the cheapest food they can get. Oatmeal’s actually pretty healthy, but the children are mostly very thin. Not enough protein. Sugar’s a cheaper calorie than beef or vegetables.”
“Good. What else? What about the people, the people in the office and the people running the clinic?”
“The nurse they have, Sister Janelle. She’s amazing. She’s got more raw talent than some of the white doctors I’ve worked with. Ones that went to good medical schools. Fred Hampton is going to work himself into a coma, but he seems like he’s convinced he’s going to die fighting. He said something, I can’t remember exactly what, but it was to the effect that he might have died anyway, in a gang or something, so he didn’t mind if his life got used up for the people. Something like that. William is an odd choice for security. He doesn’t seem like he really knows what he’s doing.”
“What do you mean, John?”
That’s when it hit me, that he was doing his job wrong, and it wasn’t just at the clinic, either.
“Wait a minute, Sherlock. Let me think. He sat in the clinic when I was watching Fred, and he watched us. But he sat next to the door, with his back to it. Not on the side where he’d be behind the door if it opened. If someone came in he’d be the first thing they saw, and presumably shot. He was observant—he was watching—but he was watching us. Fred and me. Not the door. He wasn’t paying attention like someone in charge of security who was being attacked with some regularity. It was the same in East Harlem, remember? He stood up there, and he watched us, listening to us, but he hardly paid any attention to the door.”
Sherlock nodded, drinking up my words, the mask falling from his face. He was visibly excited, thrilled.
“What about you? What did you find out? What new information have you got? You have to share, too, you know.”
“It’s big, John. Very big. It might be the biggest. One of the math professors—someone who’s on a course for tenure, but hasn’t quite got there—received a letter, a thick packet of photocopied notebook pages, about a year ago. He had no idea what they were, at first. Were they meant for him? Were they the work of a student? If so, it seemed that it was an exceptionally brilliant student. He teaches mostly the big survey courses and some advanced classes, but strictly undergraduate level. He realized it was someone else’s work, unlike six of his colleagues at other universities that Bill, you, and I could name, but he set the papers aside, not sure what to do with them. Said he’d come across them from time to time, and pick them up. There was part of him that was interested in the work. Some of it was just doodles, but most of it was what looked like number theory. Not his area of expertise, but interesting to look at. You could see his morality playing out with his curiosity across his face. He just wasn’t sure what to do, or even who to tell. He thought there were people in the department that would work on it for the intellectual challenge alone, and then maybe publish, either forgetting where it came from or assuming that their work was the greater part of the discovery. He went back and forth on it for ‘a month or two,’ he said.
“That’s when he had a visitor. A clean-cut, all-American type. ‘Ice-blue eyes, blond crew cut and with his jaw practically shaved off’ is how he described him. Asked him if he received his package. Said that ‘the government did research’ sometimes, and that they couldn’t really publish it themselves, for one reason or another. ‘Think about the Bomb. Think about the Russians, now. It’s good for us if we’re publishing plenty of research, but we don’t want the Russkies to look too closely at government priorities. So we pass on some stuff like this to people we like. A helping hand, you know. Makes America look more innovative, better at science and engineering.’ He then went on to suggest that it would unlock further funding down the road. This is lifeblood for an academic. More funding equals more publishing equals more prestige equals more research grants.”
“Well, Sherlock? What did he do?”
“He put him off. Told him it was fiendishly complex, and that it would take some time to understand it all and then finish it. A month later, he got two more sheets in the mail. And three after another month. He gets calls at random, usually when it’s inco
nvenient, like right when he’s walking out of a class, or a few minutes at the end of his office hours. He was fifteen minutes early for a date once and the visitor sat down, bought him a drink, and gave him the sales pitch all over. I looked over the photocopies. They’re extra pages from Bill’s notebooks. The thing is that some of the pages don’t seem to be exactly relevant to the core work. There were several pages of doodles. The only thing connecting them is that they’re all from the same notebook.”
“But what does it mean, Sherlock? Who on earth would want to steal Bill’s research? And what does it have to do with William?”
“All will be revealed in time. We’ll need to either get Bill to New York from Philly, or else get ourselves there. Not just yet, though. A week, I think.”
twelve
WHAT WOULD YOU THINK...
“What would you think about breaking into an FBI office?”
Bill went pale, and his eyes got wide over the dark ever-present dark circles surrounding them. “What?”
“It’s a shock, isn’t it? I think it’s the only way to find out the rest of the truth. Sorry, hang on, let me back up. Here’s what we’ve found. Someone’s taking your notebooks, but only when you’re in New York. Ergo they have access in New York. It’s someone who’s good at thievery. They’ve got both resources and political leverage. We’ve uncovered informants inside the Factory. They’ve got resources inside several universities.
“They’re trying to discredit you, personally. I’m sure there are others. Someone’s been following you, someone with access. Reading the mail you send. Copying your notebooks, and sending snippets out to other academics, so they can publish and you’ll languish. They can both promise and deliver academic funding from the government and at least one major research funding body. I identified seven likely candidates for your notes. Six of them had already published your work as their own. The last one had received photocopies of your notes but put them aside, intriguing though it was, and he was stopped by a Fed, again and again. ‘This is how things work,’ they told him, and gave a cover story that it was work done in a government lab. He was offered funding and tenure just for publishing your work.