“I speak to you today from the great wounded state of Texas. Yesterday, I walked down streets seared by the terrible flame of a war that this nation neither sought nor would have fought but for the monstrous actions of our enemies. Let it never be forgotten that this great, peace loving American nation desiring only to co-exist in peace with its neighbours and the peoples of the World was attacked not once, but twice. First at sea, then, without warning on land. Our ships going about their lawful business in international waters were the victims of a cowardly, dishonourable act of unprovoked aggression. Hours later the illegal, barbaric, puppet regime in Havana — almost certainly at the prompting of the Kremlin — launched a pre-meditated, cold-blooded, dastardly first strike at cities in the continental United States. Two unprovoked attacks. Two attacks without warning. What great nation in the history of the world has ever turned its cheek once, let alone twice before accepting that war cannot be averted. Even then we stayed our hand. Knowing that we faced unimaginable risks we stayed our hand several more hours. Hoping, praying that our enemies would repent, recant their evil ways and step back from the brink.” The preacher’s voice was slowly rising towards an inevitable crescendo. “We asked only that they stand down their offensive weapons. We asked only that they agree, in principle, to withdraw all their forces from Cuba.” The voice was pleading, demanding. It was not the voice of one of God’s lesser children, but of a man who sat at His right hand. “We only asked that they return to the status quo before the revolution in that sad island. That they hand over Castro and his henchmen. Hand him over to us so that he might face justice for his heinous war crimes against the American people...”
Again the applause overwhelmed the microphones.
Thirty seconds ticked by.
“What did our enemies do?” The voice asked, sadly, as if JFK was both disappointed and a little bemused. “What did they do? I’ll tell you what they did, my fellow Americans! They readied their engines of war! They scrambled their bombers! They moved their missiles onto their launching pads! And they said nothing to us! Nothing, my friends!”
The Governor of California wanted to get up and kick the television.
If we had right on our side why the never ending hand-wringing?
Did nobody on Capitol Hill have the cajonas to stand up and say: “You know what! The Soviets pushed us too far so we hit them with everything we had! End of story! We had no choice. It was us or them. What were we supposed to do? And anyway, the bastards attacked us first!” For all Pat Brown knew, it was actually true.
Except, if it was true why was the President of the United States of America constantly protesting his innocence like a mobster arrested at a murder scene with a smoking gun in his hand?
Chapter 3
In retrospect Miranda Margaret Sullivan viewed the two years that she had ‘dropped out’ with a mixture of horror, disbelief and self-loathing. At the time she had pretended she was rebelling, that she had been on some kind of revelatory existential journey of self-discovery. Her parents had sent her to the best schools and she had wanted for nothing during her privileged upbringing in a relatively close, moderately flaky, very wealthy Hollywood family. The little sister of three protective brothers — all three were regular guys just like her father — she had been pampered, spoiled, indulged and protected all her young life until she half-escaped to Berkeley. College life had exposed her to real people for the first time, opened her eyes to the endless possibilities of adult life; and she had honestly believed that she was immortal. Partly, that had been the drugs; weed at first, then uppers, downers, and later whatever was on offer. Partly, it had been the incredibly bad company she kept. Partly, it had been because she was tired of being ‘Mummy’s good little girl’, some kind of perfect fairy princess to be dressed up and paraded like a trophy in front of her parents’ friends.
The night of the October War had been — as it had been for so many others — her personal apotheosis. Miranda had had two lives; the one before the war and the one after the war. The person that she had been before the war was a stranger to her thirteen months later; a woman she would probably not now recognise if she met her on the street.
She had tried to kill herself when she discovered she had contracted gonorrhoea and that she was pregnant that week after the war. She had washed down a cocktail of pills with a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, collapsed, miscarried and very nearly bled to death. If Aunt Molly had not found her when she did she would have been dead over a year.
Miranda still did not know if Uncle Harvey had told her parents the half of what had happened to her at the beginning of November last year. She suspected — hoped and prayed — he had spun them a quietly plausible web of half-truths and barefaced lies, just enough to discourage them from inquiring too deeply or pressing their daughter when next she surfaced. Her Uncle and Aunt — they were not really her ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’ but Harvey and Molly Fleischer, her parents’ oldest friends and business partners had always been there for her — had locked her up until they were convinced she was ‘clean’, and subsequently pulled every conceivable string to get her re-admitted to Berkeley.
She had earned her degree that summer; not the brilliant degree she would have walked away from Berkeley with if she had not wasted two whole years of her life, but good enough to be going on with. When she was in San Francisco she lived with her Aunt and Uncle, safe from all evil, especially that represented by the company she had kept before the war.
The internship at the Governor’s Office in Sacramento was Uncle Harvey’s idea. She had been doing office work, temping, running errands for his law firm in a building off Union Square since the summer. The work was undemanding, boring a lot of the time; yet oddly fulfilling in ways she still found new and a little baffling. She liked to be busy, to be contributing, and to be anything other than idle. In idleness she remembered the person that she had become when her life had had no direction, no home, nor foundation. Filing, typing, making coffee, answering calls, delivering important letters to the nearby court house had begun to counteract her shame, to distract her from brooding on the time she had wasted and the people she had let down. Of the people she had known immediately before the war she had mostly pity and contempt. All of them except Sam Brenckmann, whose memory still evoked a miasma of conflicting emotions; fondness, regret, anger, exasperation, and guilt…
When the Governor’s Chief of Staff had asked her to ‘go on ahead to set up the Coronado thing’ a week ago her heart had leapt. She knew it was no big deal. Nonetheless, her heart had leapt. It was the first thing in her whole life that she had been trusted with, her first real test. It was a test which she had approached with the keenly methodical zeal that her new, re-born self applied to all problems. She had flown down to San Diego two days ago and walked Larry Lawrence — and his people, a motley crew of real estate hustlers and a couple of over-paid attorneys — through everything.
Twice, just so they got the message.
Her only previous knowledge of the hotel had been drawn from what she recollected of it from Billy Wilder’s film Some Like it Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. In the movie the hotel was called the ‘Seminole Ritz’. She had subsequently learned that before Some Like it Hot the Hotel del Coronado had been the backdrop of at least a dozen earlier films.