1635:The Dreeson Incident (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  "I'll notify Chief Richards right away. We'll get a full unit out to you as soon as possible."

  "I think you should indicate that this may become urgent. I now have reports that a few of the newest arrivals are apparently preparing to take signs out from under their cloaks."

  ***

  Jacques-Pierre Dumais was seriously worried. This was to have been an orderly, planned demonstration. He had made that very clear to the hired demonstrators.

  He had no idea who these other people were or why they had arrived.

  Of course, there were always certain hazards when organizing this type of thing, given the sort of people one had to use. Even the two Huguenots Deneau had brought and assigned to assist him weren't the sharpest knives in anyone's drawer.

  The miscalculation this time, although Dumais had no way of knowing it, was that two of the men contacted by Bryant Holloway early in his circuit of the towns of Thuringia were genuine anti-autopsy fanatics. When they had heard that there was to be a demonstration against the sacrilegious practices of the up-time hospital on a certain date, they had not only come to Grantville themselves, but had brought their friends.

  Jacques-Pierre was cautious by nature. He found it prudent to withdraw from the scene. It was not as if his presence had been conspicuous to begin with. He had merely been standing among the rear of the first group in the parking lot. He crossed to the other side of Route 250 and stood back from the highway, near the corner of a building. Corners were good places to stand. In a pinch, a person could always go around the corner and emerge somewhere else.

  From his location at the rear of the original group, he had been providing instructions to Friedrich Klick from Halle, who was playing the role of leader in the anti-vaccination demonstration. When Dumais disappeared without leaving any guidance as to what his puppet should do next, Klick began to panic. He had no knowledge about the additional men who were arriving, no contacts among them, and no way to get them organized. He slipped to the side of his group, walked backwards for several steps, and then ran. Several others of the original fifty or so followed him. Others surged forward to take their places.

  By the time the Grantville police were fully in place around Leahy, there were an estimated two hundred fifty participants in the demonstration.

  Two or three smaller bands had attempted to force their way into the building.

  Inside, the staff was evacuating all patients into center rooms.

  Outside, the police had taken ranks at all the entrances. The police dispatchers had contacted the fire department and advised them not to bring ill or injured people to the hospital. Traffic on Route 250 had been blocked in both directions. The trolley to and from Rudolstadt had to turn around several blocks to the east of the hospital and return from there.

  Two hours after Gary Lambert's first call, the demonstration at the hospital had nearly the entire on-duty Grantville police force fully occupied. Not all of them. Jurgen Neubert and Marvin Tipton were down by the Y where the bridges came together, since someone had called in a disturbance in front of Cora's. One of those anti-Semitic ranters who'd been showing up in several nearby towns the last couple of weeks had finally made it to Grantville, it seemed.

  Angela Baker, on dispatch, was contacting those off-duty to come in.

  Police spokesmen with bullhorns attempted to persuade the demonstrators to disperse. A call for the leader of the group produced Klick. He came around from behind a parked wagon at the edge of the lot and was quite willing to speak to the police, but it turned out that his main wish was that they should get him away from the site.

  As he said, plainly, he had, after all, been hired to come and do this. As had everyone who had come with him. He would be quite willing to tell the Polizei everything he knew in return for the favor of being removed from the scene. More than willing to do it. Happy to do it.

  When the rest of the anti-vaccination demonstrators saw him being placed in a police car, they moved toward that side of the parking lot. This allowed the anti-autopsy demonstrators to take up a more central position, directly in front of the main entrance.

  A shoving, pushing, and shouting match developed at the side. No one seemed to be able to get the idea across that Klick was being evacuated at his own wish.

  "It looks to me," Bill Magen said, "that a batch more of these guys are getting ready to pull out their signs and start waving them. They're twitching at their cloaks."

  "Moving forward, too," the officer next to him answered. That was Karl Maurer, who was scowling fiercely. "I don't like this. It's a good hospital. When my son was so sick in the winter, coughing, they brought him here. The physicians cured him."

  A man moved to the front. "We demand that you surrender to us the surgeon who violates the bodies of the dead!"

  Many of the demonstrators reached under their cloaks.

  "Those aren't signs!" Magen called. "Those are guns."

  Ralph Onofrio, the senior man on duty, moved forward to try to calm the situation.

  The more aggressive autopsy protesters began to move forward from the perimeter, pushing the earlier anti-vaccination demonstrators who had not moved to the side already toward the hospital. One man lost his balance and fell forward. Several, trying to escape the readied guns to their rear, ran over him as they were pushed in the direction of the hospital entrance.

  The smaller groups by the bakery and laundry moved toward the main entrance, pulling weapons as they came.

  Then the whole crowd moved forward a few steps, several of the demonstrators readying their guns. Within five minutes, the demonstration had become an armed confrontation.

  Onofrio was still calling orders when Maurer, the policeman whose croupy child had been treated at the hospital, fired. Most of the other down-time policemen, without waiting for orders, followed suit.

  The Grantville police had notably more firepower than the demonstrators, not to mention better body armor. Still, it was not exactly a massacre. There were many more armed demonstrators than policemen and they did not hesitate to shoot back.

  A significant number of the unarmed anti-vaccination demonstrators were caught between the two armed groups.

  It lasted quite a while. Several of the armed demonstrators had remained around the edges of the parking lot. They sheltered behind vehicles, fences, landscaping, just as they would have done in their home villages if fighting a delaying action against a marauding mercenary band.

  The firing continued for quite some time as the police attempted to disengage enough of their people ringing the building to get behind the scattered shooters.

  As long as the shooting continued, it was impossible for anyone to try to deal with those who had fallen dead or wounded outside the building.

  Several of the panicked, unarmed original hired anti-vaccination demonstrators, caught between the two sources of fire, managed to break through the police line, seeking refuge in the hospital's main lobby, which started a second sphere of action as the hospital staff attempted to prevent them from pushing farther into the building.

  "Oh God, Marvin," Jurgen Neubert cried out to his partner, who was standing on the sidewalk by Cora's. "He's dead. It came in over the car radio. Ralph's dead. Angela, Angela, what is happening?"

  "The demonstration. The one at the hospital. There were other groups, off to the side. Press is on his way over there. Marvin, I've got to tell you. We fired the first shot. Bill Magen is dead, too. I know that for sure."

  Marvin Tipton grabbed the hand-held.

  "Who fired?"

  "Maurer. It was Karl Maurer who shot first. It's all so confused, still."

  "Hang in there, Angela. We're heading over."

  "What do you have, Franz?" Jurgen asked.

  "Three more of yours, here. Besides Officer Onofrio. Maurer. And both of the Hansen. Shruer and Schultz. The two ex-mercenaries. The ones who were always together. There are several more wounded policemen. They have taken them inside the hospital, Erika Fleischer sai
d. She is okay. Not hurt."

  "Perps? Ah, demonstrators. How many?"

  "Seventeen here."

  Here was the morgue.

  "Inside?"

  "I am not sure. Many. Almost forty, maybe. There were others who could still run, and did."

  Pam, Ron, and Missy came out onto the sidewalk in front of Pam's apartment when they heard a shot. Followed by lots of shots.

  The gunfire wasn't really close, so they stood there, listening.

  "Over toward the hospital," Ron said.

  "I think I can guess why we're low priority for the police," Pam answered. "Should we grab our guns and head over there?"

  "The dispatcher didn't sound flustered or say anything about getting the reserves out when we talked to her," Ron answered. "We'd probably be more in the way than anything else. Let's concentrate on writing up every single thing that happened to you girls this morning, in order. So you'll have it when they do get around to talking to you."

  "Including that we were planning to sneak into Veda Mae's garage?"

  "I think we can leave that out," Ron said. "We can tell that to Cory Joe, for Don Francisco, but as far as Preston Richards and the Grantville police force are concerned, let's start with Pam walking down the street and seeing the guys unloading the signs out of Veda Mae's garage."

  Pam was about half way through her part of the narrative when she stopped writing. "Do you know what we forgot to do while we where there?"

  "What?"

  "We forgot to look in the extra garbage cans. They're why we went in the first place."

  "Well, we can't very well go back now. There are people swarming all over the place because of that shooting over by the hospital."

  "Maybe we can try again next Sunday morning."

  Ron and Missy looked at her. "Pam," Ron said, "by next Sunday, whatever was there is likely to be long gone."

  "Then maybe we should go back now."

  This time the other two looked at one another with the mutual unspoken feeling that Pam was maybe getting a little over-involved in this project.

  "I don't think so," Missy said.

  Chapter 47

  Grantville

  March 4, 1635

  The batch of genuine anti-Jewish fanatics whom Gui Ancelin and the Frankfurt anti-Semites had garnered from more than a dozen towns in the SoTF, mostly from Franconia, headed for the synagogue under the leadership of Fortunat Deneau. The action started as he had designed it, with a few people standing around a man who was giving a harangue on the pattern of those that the agitators had been giving in other towns throughout the SoTF in recent weeks. Harangues which the SoTF administration did not like but which it had to tolerate under its own free speech laws. The small group would then attract a few more spectators, gradually growing in size. The only thing that might make it conspicuous would be that all the spectators were male, but Deneau regarded that as unavoidable. Women in such crowds were ordinarily drawn from the town where the riot was to occur, but the public opinion in Grantville was such that if there were local anti-Semites, they did not ordinarily proclaim their opinions openly.

  This harangue, unlike the ones that had been delivered in other towns, drew the attention of Henry Dreeson and Enoch Wiley, who were standing and talking outside of the Presbyterian church after the end of the eleven o'clock service. The service had run late because of communion. Enoch never saw any reason to abbreviate his sermon on communion Sundays.

  As quickly as possible-which was no longer very quickly, in Henry's case-they walked over to stand in front of the synagogue door. As the harangue continued, both of them spoke to the gathering crowd. Henry, basically, tried reasoning. Wiley preached the seventeenth century Presbyterian line, in no way variant from his own twentieth century beliefs, that predestination was all and that if God wanted the Jews to convert, they would. Since they had not done so, this constituted evidence that they still had a part to play in the Divine Plan.

  Deneau had not prepared for this development, having had no way to anticipate it. As he tried to think how best to proceed next, Leon Boucher showed up with a message from Dumais. The Grantville police force was now fully occupied at the hospital.

  That was his signal. They would have to proceed. He sent in the remainder of the actual anti-Jewish fanatics, the ones Weitz had brought from Frankfurt am Main and other cities of the Rhine and Main rivers. A substantial number of them were veterans of prior anti-Jewish riots. He reinforced them with those from the nearby Thuringian towns who had been standing around as "spectators" up to that point. These larger numbers coalesced around the haranguer. Meininger, his name was, from Schleusingen.

  By the time they were in place, however, the circumstances changed again. A number of men came running down the street shoving the table-and-chair pushcart that belonged to the Presbyterian Church. They had dragged it out from the education wing, with the piano from the old "yahoo shack" on it and Inez Wiley riding along.

  They were followed by a group of women who, he noted, might for the most part be described as "advanced in middle age." The Reverend Simon Jones, had he been present, would have informed Deneau that they were "front-pew battleaxes." More specifically, they were the board of directors and a couple of committee chairmen of the Grantville chapter of the Red Cross, which had been starting a meeting in the Presbyterian church's education wing.

  The men pushed the cart up next to Mayor Dreeson and Reverend Wiley. Once they set the brakes on it, Inez Wiley started to pound out a selection of hymns that she deemed most appropriate to the occasion. The Red Cross ladies started to sing.

  "Ye chosen seed of Israel's race,

  Ye ransomed from the fall."

  Brillard stood on the bridge toward the rear of the demonstration, leaning on a balustrade and looking mildly curious. It had been his intention to carry out a simple act, precisely in accord with Locquifier's instructions. While apparently watching the man delivering the harangue, he had in fact been watching the mayor as he stood in front of the Presbyterian church. He had intended simply to shoot him there.

  That his target had moved to the front of the synagogue was something of a complication. However, the opportunity was still reasonable, even if his line of shot was no longer quite so clean because of the cluster of women on the steps. Perhaps he could even add some confusion to the scene by killing the minister as well. Certainly, killing the town's Calvinist clergyman should serve to divert suspicion away from the Huguenots, if any should through some misfortune arise. While simultaneously cementing the idea that Richelieu, the persecutor of French Protestantism, was the instigator.

  Brillard pulled an up-time carbine out from under his long cloak, took Dreeson and Wiley down with two quick shots, dropped the gun into the creek, and calmly walked away.

  He disliked losing the gun. It was a marvelous weapon, and had cost them quite a bit to obtain. But it would be too dangerous now to keep it. Even a small carbine was not so easy to hide, once a real search got underway.

  Inez Wiley reacted to her husband's fall by crashing a chord on the piano and launching into Jerusalem the Golden. The attackers, fanatics and goons alike, pulled their weapons out from under their clothes. Few had guns. The fanatics had been told that the point of this attack was to do damage to the synagogue rather than to kill people. Nobody expected that there would be any significant number of Jews in the building on a Sunday at noon. It had generally been overlooked that this day was the fourteenth of Adar, 5395, the festival of Purim, which celebrated the deliverance of the Jews in Persia from the plots of Haman the Agagite.

  The significance of the date had escaped Locquifier's attention entirely, since his main interest was not in the attack at all, but in using it as a red herring to distract attention while Brillard carried out the assassination of Dreeson. Neither Ducos nor Delerue nor their Huguenot followers had anything in particular against Grantville's Jews. Their hatred was focused on Cardinal Richelieu, who was to be blamed for the attack.

&nb
sp; The date had not occurred to the fanatics, either, in Frankfurt or elsewhere. If it had, they might have harbored a few thoughts of satisfaction along the general lines of double jeopardy, that where Haman had failed, they would succeed in their attack. However, most of them were sufficiently ignorant concerning the objects of their hatred that they had no knowledge of the Jewish calendar whatsoever. The Book of Esther was rarely included in their favorite reading matter in any case, since it tended to portray the Jews in a far too heroic light. Quite a few of them suspected God of extremely poor judgment in having selected His chosen people.

  They had therefore brought mauls, axes, sledgehammers, and other implements designed mainly to destroy material objects. One of the hired goons closest to the synagogue steps attacked the piano with a sledgehammer, mainly to get it out of the way. It was blocking a significant portion of their access to the facade. It was only a small spinet type, comparatively light and easy to move around on a dolly. His second blow was sufficiently furious to tip it over. It landed on one of Inez Wiley's legs, knocking her off the piano bench and pinning her down.

  The remainder of the attackers launched themselves at the building, aiming first at the expensive glass windows. The men who had been handling the pushcart grabbed metal folding chairs from it, wielding them first as shields around the bodies of Dreeson and Wiley but then, on the principle of "let the dead bury their dead," moving over to try to keep the mob away from Inez and the Red Cross women.

  The assault started to waver. These were hardened thugs and street rioters, but they had never previously experienced the form of aural assault created by a dozen or so American ladies with nasal twangs launching themselves into "We're Marching Upward to Zion" without a piano to keep them on key-not necessarily because they were objectively brave, but because Inez was pinned down by part of the shattered piano and the rest of them were simply too stubborn to abandon her. They kept going a capella.