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 said. 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.