by Walker, Rysa
“Oh, my goodness,” I gush. “It’s lovely. So . . . how long has this been in the works?”
She waves the question away. “I think for at least a year. He made the comment last month that if that . . .” A quick look around, and then she continues in a lower voice, wearing a tiny smirk. “He told me that if that old battle-ax Dorothy Thompson is going to keep insisting that his movement is allied with the Bund, he might as well make her happy. Maybe she’ll smile for a change. I think he took the Cyrist offer much more seriously after the Jews got everyone all worked up over the Kristallnacht business and trying to defend the little murderer who started the whole thing. Thompson even started raising funds for his defense, if you can believe it. No one kicked her off the air for that, and there was nothing at all wrong with Father Coughlin’s sermon that week. He only spoke the truth. One of the Cyrists bought out that radio station, you know. That’s why they started airing his stuff again so quickly. I think that’s when he realized that we could do so much more if we can unite all God-fearing people—Catholic, Protestant, maybe even those Mormons out in Utah—under a single banner.”
“So, just between us,” I say, “I swear I won’t put it in print. Was this your idea?”
“Well, no. I was a little hesitant at first, to be honest. I mean, I’ve been a Catholic all my life. And I’ll still be a Catholic, of course, but I’ve been only a Catholic until now. He told me he had a vision about a year ago. A spirit visitor. Brother Cyrus himself. Last . . . March, I believe.”
“Really?” I struggle to keep my expression neutral. Coughlin seems like the practical type to me. Definitely not a mystic. I doubt he believes in the Holy Ghost, let alone the more mundane type, and that has me wondering how much of the story he gave to Elizabeth Dilling was fact. It seems far more likely to me that the ghost he saw was a member of Team Viper.
Dilling nods emphatically. “The first vision happened one night when he was alone up in the tower. He said it felt very real, almost as if he could reach out and touch him.”
I’ll bet it did.
Dilling glances over at a woman who is hovering a few feet away clearly wanting a turn to speak with her, and lowers her voice. “Would you mind terribly keeping that off the record, though? I mean, unless Brother Coughlin mentions it to the reporters during his press conference. I wouldn’t want him to think I’m telling tales out of school.”
“Oh, certainly,” I assure her. “Like I said, this is just between us. Listen, I don’t want to monopolize your time. I know you’re busy, and I need to run out to the car and grab my sweater. Maybe we can chat for a couple of minutes after the meeting, and I could take down a few official quotes for my article? Oh, and don’t let me forget that I need to purchase a few copies of your books for my group before I go!”
“That would be perfect,” Dilling says.
I grab a cookie from the tray as I walk by, trying to decide if there’s actually anything more I might be able to get from Dilling. I doubt it. What we need to do now is ascertain who met with Coughlin in the guise of Brother Cyrus. If we could get a stable point inside the room at the top of the tower, we could scan through to see if he had any late-night guests, although I have no idea how we’d be able to get up there. If Coughlin’s recording equipment is there, they almost certainly keep it locked, and it’s not like we can crawl through a window when it’s over a hundred feet tall.
The press conference is probably still going on, and I don’t want to interfere with any conversations that Richard may be having. So I head for the back door of the fellowship hall, which leads into the parking lot. I pull the thin coat tight around my neck to ward off the wind as I step outside . . . and straight into Saul.
FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID
THREE DEATHS AT GERMAN-AMERICAN BUND RALLY
(February 20, 1939) A “Pro-America Rally” at Madison Square Garden last night ended in tragedy when a New Jersey woman and her two children were trampled by panicked crowds rushing for the exit after a small explosive was apparently detonated in one of the upper levels of the auditorium.
The woman who was killed, Mrs. Herbert Slater of Warren Township, NJ, had been a member of the Bund since 1936. She was in the audience with her two daughters, Eliza, eight, and Marta, five, while her husband and two sons marched in uniform as part of the military guard known as the Ordnungsdienst.
The rally was sponsored by the German-American Bund and timed to coincide with the 207th anniversary of George Washington’s birth. A thirty-foot-tall banner of the nation’s first president held center stage behind the podium, flanked by US and Bund flags. It had been widely rumored that there were threats against the event, but this did not have a noticeable effect on the crowd’s size. Most of the more than twenty thousand seats in the sports hall were filled. The event received a publicity boon last week when a poster for the rally leaked the news, apparently inadvertently, that radio priest Charles Coughlin would be leaving the Catholic Church and continuing his ministry as a Cyrist.
Despite assurances by the Bund that anti-Semitic chants and posters would not be allowed, banners reading “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America” and “Wake Up, America—Smash Jewish Communism” hung from the upper tiers of the auditorium. Speakers, who included Coughlin, aviatrix Laura Houghtaling Ingalls, Bund leader Fritz Kuhn, William Dudley Pelley of the Silver Legion, and Lawrence Dennis, blamed the Jews for everything from international communism to the cost of groceries at the local supermarket.
Mayor La Guardia acknowledged in an interview yesterday that his office received an anonymous note on Wednesday threatening to explode three devices if the rally was not canceled. Security was increased to 1,700 officers, the largest number ever assigned to an event of this nature, but the mayor refused to give in to the foes of free speech. “If we are for free speech, we have to be for free speech for everybody, and that includes the Nazis.” He added, “If they bomb it, we’ll catch the bombers.” They carefully combed the entire building earlier in the day in the wake of the bomb threat, leading officials to believe that the explosive was carried in by an attendee.
In a brief statement to the press, NYPD Commissioner Valentine noted that the investigation is ongoing. Anyone with information about the attack should contact the police department immediately.
∞16∞
MADI
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
FEBRUARY 20, 1939
“Ticket holders only.” The policeman edges closer to the line of protestors, using the massive bulk of his horse to nudge them behind the barricade along Forty-Seventh Street. “Get back, all of you! If you ain’t a Bundist, you ain’t gettin’ past.”
The two men in front of us are clearly not with the German-American Bund, judging from the signs they’re holding—No Nazis in New York and Give Me a Gas Mask, I Can’t Stand the Smell of Nazis. That goes for most of the crowd, which has broken out into choruses of “Solidarity Forever” and something about having the bourgeois blues, which is actually kind of catchy. We’ve been pushing through crowds for the past block, even though we purposefully selected the Ninth Avenue entrance in hopes of avoiding the main protest gathering at Eighth and Fifty-Third. The Socialist Workers Party requested permission for a counterrally of fifty thousand people, and while newspaper interviews with police officials claimed that only a few hundred actually showed up, I’m thinking a few thousand of their fellow travelers may have gotten mixed up and wound up on the wrong side of Madison Square Garden.
If not for the Dunne family’s extensive prep work, Tyson and I would likely have been even farther off target. RJ and Alex had already begun putting together maps and various data about the five scenarios we were debating before Clio joined the team. The map Alex located was from the early 2000s and pinpointed our destination about a mile in the other direction. But that was a different Madison Square Garden, which was constructed in the 1960s after the building up ahead was demolished.
We lucked out in terms of the weather,
with the temperature still in the low fifties at nearly six p.m. The air is still damp from rain earlier in the day, but since it’s mid-February, it could be far worse. Given how tightly packed we are on the sidewalk, a blast of frigid winter wind would actually be kind of nice right now.
Tyson and I begin pushing through the crowd toward the barricade so that we can present our tickets. The officer responds to the surge by inching his horse closer. One of the men in front of us shoves at the horse’s flank, and the officer swings a leather baton in our direction. “Touch my mount again and I’ll be haulin’ you in for cruelty to dumb animals.”
When the man recoils from the baton, Tyson pushes through and flashes our tickets at the officer. The crowd responds with a chorus of boos, and we’re called several charming names, including Nazi scum, as we move toward the barricade. A woman around my age plants both of her palms on my back and shoves me forward. I slip on the wet sidewalk, but Tyson grabs my elbow, and I regain my balance at the last moment. Which is fortunate, because otherwise I’d have landed under the police officer’s horse.
Once we’re past the barrier, I say, “We do not tell Clio about that.”
“Agreed,” Tyson says.
When we arrived in 1939 and began final prep for tonight’s event, we found pretty much everything we needed waiting for us. The house was stocked with several days’ worth of provisions. Several changes of clothing, too. Tyson’s pants are about an inch too long, but the clothes fit surprisingly well given that all they had to go on were a couple of pictures that Clio hastily snapped. Someone had also put together an array of disguises, which may come in handy eventually. There were two pistols, as well, which look quite a bit like the one in my grandfather’s desk. The most important things they provided, however, were file folders with extensive background information on each of the events we think might have been changed. The one for the Bund rally included tickets to the event, contact info for protestors who will be arrested, and detailed biographies of the speakers, including Fritz Kuhn (who calls himself the “American führer”), Brother Charles Coughlin, Laura Houghtaling Ingalls (not the author, thank God), and Lawrence Dennis, who Tyson described as one of the leading thinkers of the fascist movement in the old timeline. Dennis was brought up on probably bogus charges of sedition during World War II, but never convicted. In this new timeline, he’ll have a reversal of fortunes, serving in both the Bilbo and the Dies administrations. I have no clue who either of those individuals are, but I’m certain they never made it to the White House in our history. I don’t feel a strong desire to dig any further into their biographies. Tyson’s expression when he mentioned them told me everything I needed to know.
There were also bios on about a dozen members of the press who are attending tonight’s event. The only name I recognized was Dorothy Thompson, a syndicated columnist with the New York Herald Tribune. According to the file, she was the first American journalist Hitler kicked out of Germany when the war began, and one of the most widely known and respected journalists of the era—which makes me a little ashamed to admit that the only reason I recognized her name was because of her tumultuous marriage to one of the literary stars of the 1930s, Sinclair Lewis. According to the newspaper accounts, Thompson will be hauled out of the event for heckling Kuhn, the leader of the Bund, a few minutes before protestors break through the security barrier.
The oddest thing in the information packet was a list with the names and badge numbers for twenty-two current NYPD police officers who are connected to the KKK and the Universal Front. I wasn’t sure why the list was relevant. The Klan and the Bund are ideological allies. In fact, the Grand Giant of the New Jersey KKK, who’s also vice president of the Bund, is one of the speakers at tonight’s event. It seems very unlikely that Team Viper would have been able to convince any officer with KKK ties to help with the attack. The only solid bit of intelligence that Kiernan had been able to get from the police was that the bomb itself appeared to have been a false alarm or, at a bare minimum, so small that it did no obvious damage. They searched the building meticulously afterward and found no sign of an explosive.
Tyson, however, had immediately recognized the value of the information on the Klan. As he scanned and saved the list and other documents with his lens gadget, he explained that our tight schedule meant we’d likely have a difficult time getting anything more from the authorities than Kiernan had, even with the advantage of a few well-placed bribes. But the list gave Tyson twenty-two contacts he could greet with a secret handshake and a racist comment or two, and (hopefully) walk away with information that would help us figure out how to reverse these three deaths and undo whatever changes Team Viper has set rolling.
But while we were going through the papers earlier, Clio realized that there are no stable points inside Madison Square Garden. Since there are seven others within a mile radius that are valid in 1939, this wouldn’t be a big deal under normal circumstances. Of course, under normal circumstances, historians aren’t contending with a timer ticking down the minutes they have left to fix the damn timeline. And so we had no choice but to waste a half hour fighting our way through the crowds in the area.
Clio spent several minutes berating herself for this oversight before we left the apartment. “Mom could have attended an event there and left stable points,” she said. “Dad wouldn’t have been able to do it. But my mom can still lock in the interface well enough to set a stable point. That would have been useful not just for jumping in, but for observing the auditorium remotely. I can’t believe I didn’t think about that.”
Tyson pointed out that we were still several hours ahead thanks to her foresight in getting tickets and having her family do most of the background research. And he’s right. If we manage to pull this off, most of the credit will be due to their effort and to Clio’s quick thinking in jumping back to give them the background information they needed to set all of this up. The fact that I didn’t think of it when I was in Seneca Falls suggests our team would probably be much better off if I were the observer and Clio was the official member of the team. Although, to be fair, none of the historians thought of it, either. They’re used to having everything they need for a jump provided for them—clothing, ID, background data, etc. None of us were really trained for this.
When we reach the entrance, we find that several of the protestors seem to have broken through the barrier and are verbally sparring with a line of young men in uniforms reminiscent of the SS—black pants and boots, gray shirts, shoulder belts, and swastika armbands. The police are just watching at this point. They look bored, and I suspect they wouldn’t entirely mind if the two sides got into a row, so that they could step in and break it up.
“Too bad we can’t just stay out here,” I whisper to Tyson as we head toward the ticket booth. “I feel a lot more connected ideologically to the crowd on the other side of the barricade.”
“Tell me about it,” he says, looking around nervously as he hands our tickets to the woman inside the booth. It hadn’t even occurred to me until this moment that Tyson is likely to garner a few suspicious glances at this event. I may feel out of place, but I’m a pale, blue-eyed blonde. My face would be right at home on one of their Aryan propaganda posters.
The woman stashes our tickets in the box and then shoves two programs through the slot at the bottom of the window. I suspect that she’s employed by the owners of the Garden rather than the Bund, based on her tone and the slight curl of her upper lip as she tells us to enjoy the show.
“Not bloody likely,” I say under my breath as we step inside.
Tyson snorts. “Not a fan of swastikas?”
“Or political rallies. Or crowds. Any of this.” I nod toward the far end of the auditorium, where the massive portrait of Washington we saw in various articles about this event stares back at us. He’s in a typical soldier’s pose on the tall, thin canvas, flanked by US and Bund flags. I’m not normally prone to excessive patriotism, possibly because I’ve spent as much time
in the UK as I have in the US, but seeing Washington surrounded by swastikas evokes a visceral reaction. Was he really America’s first fascist, as Fritz Kuhn, the pudgy little swindler who calls himself the American führer, will claim tonight? My knowledge of ancient American history doesn’t go beyond the basic undergraduate courses, and the myths surrounding Washington are so pervasive that it’s hard to sort fact from fiction. I do know he was an isolationist, but that was a wise precaution in his era. When you have a fledgling nation, the surest way to destroy it would be to take sides in the conflicts of other countries. And yes, he owned slaves, although I seem to recall that he freed them when he died. But that doesn’t quite add up to a fascist in my mind. For one thing, would a fascist have so readily turned down the suggestion that he should become king?
We separate once we’re inside, and I wander around the main hall, CHRONOS key in hand, trying to set observation points as unobtrusively as possible. This is the earliest change to the timeline, and the style-points total suggests that our opponents made this change last, since they went in reverse order. If we want to negate those points, we’ll need to do the same. Our goal for this trip, therefore, is to set up our surveillance stable points and try to find out exactly what happened. If Tyson gets a chance to speak with Lawrence Dennis, he’ll take it, but we’ll hold off on Coughlin until we find out what Richard and Katherine learn in Detroit. Once we have the stable points set, we can head back to the apartment to watch and see when the device was planted and by whom.
With that in mind, I duck into the ladies’ room to set an entry point for my return trip, so that we don’t have to waste time fighting our way through demonstrators and wannabe Nazis again. According to Tyson, bathroom stalls are the very best spot for setting local stable points, even better than broom closets, since you tend to arouse suspicion when stepping out of the latter. It feels a bit skeevy to me, though. Not just the general ick factor, even though this is far from the cleanest bathroom I’ve encountered. The bigger issue is that I’m dreading the prospect of scrolling through to find a time when the stall is empty and invading the privacy of God only knows how many women in the process.