It was dreadful! You really could not trust anything you read in the papers or heard on the news! The printed media and the people who ran the networks were all closet Reds!
Except, if it was all lies, surely the Administration would have quashed them by now?
And where was the President?
Gretchen had dressed soberly for the meeting with the Under Secretary, and half considered wearing glasses — she kept a pair with plain lenses just in case — to make her seem older and a little dowdier. She had decided against it after a short mental tussle with her vanity. George Ball was not, from what she had learned, a man who was going to have his head turned by a flighty young thing. She could not help being pretty; ensuring that the Under Secretary took her seriously was the main thing.
The State Department Building was actually the old War Department Building completed in 1941. It only became the State Department Building after the military realised it was not big enough, and was inherited by ‘State’ in the late 1940s. This original structure, since supplemented between 1956 and 1960 by the ‘State Department Extension’ — civil servants had no imagination when they thought up names for things — was still officially called the ‘War Department Building’. It was all very confusing for a woman who was desperate to seem appropriately clewed up for her first meeting with her prospective new boss!
The original building had been designed in the Stripped Classical style, and incorporated a number of Art Moderne elements. In other words, the architect wanted it to look like it was inspired by something he had studied in France or Italy as a young man. Gretchen knew she was not without her faults but she had little time or patience for intellectual or cultural snobbery. Limestone-clad and steel-framed, the original State Department was eight stories high, with two underground levels and to facilitate future expansion — the military had got something right — designed with an asymmetrical footprint. Within the wings of the building there were courtyards and open spaces, and she conceded that the recently completed extension blended relatively harmoniously with the original design. Other than the Pentagon the complex was the biggest office block in DC.
The Executive Offices were on the fifth floor on the eastern side of the old building, and as befitted rooms presented to impress foreign visitors, emissaries and ambassadors, everything was very grand.
First, Gretchen’s appointment, scheduled for four-thirty was put back until six o’clock.
Then until seven.
Finally, she was told that the Under Secretary would be ‘back in the building after eight’.
This last advice turned out to be unduly pessimistic.
George Ball actually swept into his office suite at eight minutes to eight o’clock that evening.
Chapter 45
Judy’s unborn son — or daughter, she did not think she was carrying twins even though she could not believe how huge she was every time she looked at herself in the mirror — started kicking as Sabrina was tuning the old valve radio in the cluttered living room of the big house. The President was delivering a ‘State of the Nation’ address at eight o’clock Washington DC time; six o’clock in California. Outside it was already dark.
Sam had gone off in Sabrina’s pickup about an hour ago. He was opening at the Troubadour later that evening before moving on to a late night club in Santa Monica. He had almost not gone but Judy had sworn she was fine and that she would know when she was ‘really close’. That was a lie but he would only have worried if she had started unloading her fears onto him. Besides, Sabrina was watching over her like the Glinda the Good Witch of the South transplanted directly out of the pages of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
What could possibly go wrong?
There was a rush of static.
Hail to the Chief swooped and plunged, attenuating from a mutter to a bellow before settling to a wobbling level. Judy smiled, thinking of the old sound box and amplifier Sam often fiddled with in the yard to amuse the neighbourhood kids. He had brought home an ancient Gibson electric guitar that looked like a truck had driven over it, tuned it up and plugged it into the box and started making noises just like Sabrina’s ancient radio while it was warming up.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the announcer in stentorian tones, “the President of the United States of America!”
Sabrina bounced up and saluted.
“Fascist!” She spat.
Judy shook her head.
She was no great fan of John Fitzgerald Kennedy but she found Sabrina’s visceral contempt for the President a little excessive. It was not as if the poor man had blown up the World because he wanted to. Leastways, she hoped he had not done it just for the Hell of it.
At that moment there was a very loud hammering at the front of Gretsky’s.
“Go away!” Sabrina yelled. Hammering on her front door was not the way to win either her friendship and or her approbation. “Whatever you’ve got we don’t want any of it!”
After a moment the hammering re-started.
This time the noise was so loud it sounded like whoever was on the porch actually had a hammer.
A very big hammer.
The unmistakable sound of wood splintering was accompanied by a distant shriek of alarm, followed by a woman’s scream froze the words forming on Sabrina’s pale lips.
Momentarily there were heavy, stamping, tramping feet in the house.
“Everybody stay where you are!”
“Keep your hands where we can see them!”
“Nobody move!”
“Everybody get on the floor!”
Judy’s brain was operating in slow motion while events around her ran crazily out of control.
How do I ‘stay still’, and ‘get on the floor’, and not ‘move’?
Some of the men who had stormed into the room were wearing Los Angeles Police Department uniforms; all of the unwelcome visitors were brandishing hand guns or pump action shot guns.
How frightening could two women trying to listen to the radio be?
Especially when one of them was heavily pregnant?
“STAND UP!”
“Leave her alone, you bastards!” Sabrina screeched and flew towards the men who had roughly hauled Judy to her feet. Judy’s friend ran into one patrolman, and bounced half-way back across the room into the arms of a fat, sweating man in an incredibly badly fitting crumpled blue suit at least two sizes too small for his middle aged spread. Judy watched uncomprehendingly as the gorilla wrenched Sabrina to her feet by her hair and casually swiped her across the face with the back of his free hand.
It was as the cops cuffed Judy’s hands behind her back that her waters burst…