09:45.
“I like my coffee black with one sugar,” she declared, badly needing to sit down and take the weight off her aching bones. Her doctors said it would take many more months for her to ‘fully recover’ from the injuries she had sustained in December; she doubted if she would ever ‘fully recover’, not at least in the sense that she would be as she was before. There would be pain, bearing children would probably not be the straightforward — well, relatively straightforward — thing it might have been, and inevitably, she would be a little old a little before her time. All of which she was fine with; being alive was the main thing and being happily married to a man she loved was a thing she had never, ever taken for granted. One way and another she did not plan to complain, or to make any kind of big deal about the things she could not longer do; life was about concentrating about what one can do.
The nearest FBI man pulled out a chair for her.
Gretchen sat down.
When it arrived her coffee was the right color and appropriately sugared but otherwise unpleasant and unlike anything she would call coffee at home, or in her own office. Notwithstanding, sipping the vaguely vile brew stopped her having to make polite conversation with the unhappy G-men gathering around the conference table.
“We will be taping the call,” Clyde Tolson said like a threat.
“I will expect a full transcript,” she replied, coolly.
Dwight Christie wasted no time calling the shots. The men in the room had been getting restive when, at 10:07, the air had crackled with distant background static.
“Are you there, Gretchen?”
“Yes, Dwight.”
“Who else is in the room?”
“Director Tolson, Agents Noble and Murdoch and four other men who have not been introduced to me.”
“Okay… ”
Gretchen looked around the table trying not to broadcast her nervousness.
“Sorry I whacked you so hard, Murdoch,” Christie declared, his matter of fact remorse seemingly entirely genuine. “You’re a big guy and I thought you’d go down after I caught you with that first sneak right hand.”
“What is all this about, Dwight?” Gretchen asked. It was the obvious question.
“That’s complicated. It’ll take the Bureau about ten minutes to trace this call. Mr Tolson’s boys will already know which exchanges it is being routed through. Once they get back to the originating exchange they’ll be all over me. Sorry, but I’ll keep this short and sweet.”
One small part of Gretchen’s mind was saying ‘we have to get this equipment installed in our downtown offices’, the rest of her head was trying to decode what exactly she was doing still sitting here in a second floor FBI office on 9th and Chestnut Streets.
Dwight Christie had planned to let her in on the secret anyway.
“For the record,” he went on ruefully, “Mrs Brenckmann had no prior knowledge of, or suspicion that I planned to renege on the deal with Justice. Had she had such knowledge or the suspicion of the same I am sure she would have notified the FBI and the Department of Justice.”
Gretchen’s frown had become a scowl.
“Now we’ve got that out of the way,” Christie chuckled, “we can get down to business. The Government wants the Bedford Pine Park killers dead or alive. I’m the only guy who can make that happen before those crazy bastards do something even worse. But that’s never going to happen if I’ve got the whole Philadelphia Field Office on my back. Galen Cheney would see me, or any of J. Edgar’s finest coming a mile away.”
The line hissed loudly.
Gretchen shivered involuntarily.
Dwight Christie knew where to find the killers.
He had always known where to find them.
Chapter 34
A fortnight ago Darlene had mentioned, in passing, that ‘sometimes I miss the TV’. Her husband had promptly acquired a small monochrome set and jury rigged an aerial on the after mast of the China Girl.
Miranda Sullivan’s brother, Gregory — the youngest of her three brothers, and only a couple of years her senior — was the ‘nice guy’ of the family whom their parents had never expected to amount to very much. He had been blissfully happy teaching school, he had fallen hopelessly in love with Darlene on first sight — and she likewise with him — and now he owned his own boat. Oh, and he and Darlene were expecting their first child. Basically, his cup was running over and he had spent the last few months walking around with an idiotic smile on his face.
While Miranda sometimes envied her brother she knew she could never be him. Or like him. He was made the way he was, and she was what she was; flawed in ways she could not explain to any living soul.
“Miranda!” Darlene called from the lounge.
It had been a cool, overcast day with fog in the Bay all morning and drizzle in the air all afternoon. Miranda had taken the bus into San Francisco and spent the middle part of the day working in the NAACP office, filling envelopes and answering the phone. Darlene had heard her foot fall on the deck over her head.
“Miranda! Come on down, you’ll want to see this!”
Darlene was standing up watching the TV screen as if her feet were nailed to the planks underfoot.
“We were just talking to General George Decker, the Chief of Staff of the US Army,” explained a strangely uncertain Walter Cronkite. “When something happened… We are endeavoring to restore the connection… ”
“He was talking to this Army guy on the telephone and there was this really big bang,” Darlene explained. “And there was a lot of screaming and shouting and cussing… And then the line went dead… ”
Cronkite was talking.
“General Decker was talking to me from City Hall in Joliet, Illinois about the wave of bombings across that state and neighboring Indiana and Iowa. I was asking him to clarify the situation in Milwaukee. I was asking him when the Army and the Navy would allow journalists and TV reporters to visit the Michigan coast city which appears to have been cut off from the World for over three weeks… ”
Miranda stepped into the lounge and she and her sister-in-law exchanged pecking kisses.
“I know things are bad back home in Georgia and Mississippi,” Darlene said, her drawl almost childishly innocent. “But nobody stopped no newsmen going into Birmingham or Jackson or Selma.”
Walter Cronkite was talking, his expression severe and his voice ringing with a peculiarly sad gravitas as if he was having trouble believing, let alone, crediting what he was saying.
“Earlier this afternoon President Kennedy’s spokesman refused to confirm or deny that White House Chief of Staff Marvin Watson had resigned. Watson, a long-term ally of Vice President Johnson, is believed to have quit the Administration for quote ‘family and personal reasons’ and returned to his home in Dallas, Texas. It is not known if he will be paying his respects to the Vice President who is currently convalescing at his Ranch at Stonewall, near Austin. The White House has yet to make any comment on recent events in the Midwest… ”
Darlene was looking perplexed.
“General Decker was talking about a place called Madison,” she explained. “Before the big bang… ”
Miranda trawled her memory.
“I think Madison is the state capital of Wisconsin,” she thought out aloud. “It’s about eighty miles west of Milwaukee and about a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Chicago.”
“He said there was a big fight going on around it and that ‘insurgents’,” Darlene found the word hard to wrap her Southern vowels around, “were ‘pouring’ up Interstate 94 towards a crossroads at a place called Tomah, and west to Dubuque, Iowa along Route 151. He said the Air Force was bombing the roads and ‘taking out’ bridges along both them roads… ”