Chicago
July 1933
“Take it from the top, Dick.”
“Okay, but then I gotta start from the bottom.” Dick paused for effect and stomped the earth of the Midway, pounded to fir-like consistency by a billion footfalls. “Under the ground. Elements decay and send out radiation. It comes up through the soles of your feet just like the X-rays in your shoe-fitting machine.”
Dawn hid a smile. She had not known that Dick had tailed her back to the shoe stall, but she was not surprised.
“How do we know that? Because scientists detect more rays closer to the ground, fewer as they climb higher—air absorbs ’em, see.”
“Then why ‘cosmic’?” Dawn already knew, but it was fun to provoke Dick.
“’Cause if you keep going higher—like in a balloon—you again start seeing more and more of ’em.” Dick reached into his satchel, pulled out his notebook, and began flipping through it. She was mildly worried he’d try to make her digest a slab of equations until he stopped on the last page: the picture he had sketched of her, arms outstretched, bathed in radiance from above. “Put you on your X-ray machine and that’s the full picture. Rays from above and below. The ones from below created by decay. Annihilation. Millikan hates that.”
“Why?”
“He’s a Christian. Has theories about God and what He is up to, what is His master plan, how is He gonna keep the universe from running down the way this midway will when November rolls around. Now. Go up. In a balloon. At first, fewer rays. After that, more and more, coming down from the cosmos. What made ’em?”
“I don’t know, more atoms decaying in space?”
“If the rays are protons and electrons—and I guess we gotta include neutrons now—then yeah, the annihilation hypothesis wins, and Millikan’s pissed off, pardon my French, and has to have a little talk with God. But that’s what Compton thinks.”
“What does Millikan think?”
“That they are light.”
“Light?”
Dick shrugged. “High-energy light, like your X-rays, but more so. Caused by lighter elements fusing to make heavier ones—ones heavy enough to make physical bodies. Like you and me, Dawn.”
They kissed. It happened so spontaneously that she was not sure which of them had started it. They backed away from each other, Dawn reaching up to stabilize the eagle, which was threatening to pitch forward off her head and pounce on poor Dick. It seemed to have been the right, the natural thing to do, to celebrate the holy fact that light elements had long ago fused in glorious showers of penetrating radiance to form the elements that made their lips and the warm blood rushing through them.
Dick was a moment getting his equilibrium back but then seemed to think that to keep talking was the best salve for the awkwardness. “Praise the Lord,” he blurted, and she knew it had been his first kiss.
“Amen,” she returned. Straightening her headdress had made her aware of how conspicuous she was in this getup. She looked around to see if any children had noticed. As a living avatar of the Century of Progress, she needed to keep up appearances. Some people were looking at them, but the place was full of unique exhibits, and a boy kissing a girl was nothing on the Smallest Bible ITW or the twitching dirndls of the Mädchen in the stein-carrying contest.
“Compton doesn’t buy it, huh?”
“Nope, he’s an Annihilation man.”
“Not a Christian?”
“Different kinda one, I guess.”
“How about you, Dick?”
“Jew. You, Dawn?”
“Communist.” There was a little thrill in exposing that much of herself even though—especially because—she didn’t have to.
“Not the kind of Jew that goes around wearing the little hat,” Dick went on.
“Obviously.”
“Atheist, Ethical Culture Society and all that. What kind of Red are you then?”
“Oh, long story.”
“We got all night.”
Somehow they ended up walking toward the shoe store, as if drawn thither by the green glow of X-rays. They held hands, occasionally wiping them on their garments as they slickened in the humid heat of the Midwestern summer, then shyly rejoining.
“Compton got his Nobel for X-ray stuff,” Dick remarked.
“I thought those were old hat.”
“He solved a riddle, a quantum riddle. Showed that they were particles as well as waves,” Dick said, “particles called photons.” He enjoyed pronouncing that word.
The little door in the back of the shoe stall was padlocked, which Dawn looked on as barring entry unless they were prepared to unleash revolutionary violence. But Dick borrowed a pin from her headdress, dropped down on one bare knee as if to tender a marriage proposal, and went to work. In a minute or so the lock snicked open and they slipped inside. That it hadn’t been closed for long was suggested by the lingering scents of Mr. Green’s pomade and Mrs. Green’s powder, and the warmth still emanating from the X-ray machine, which they had dragged inside for safekeeping. As if he owned it, Dick removed the access panel at the bottom, allowed a lead slab to whomp into the ground, and exposed the glass tube that made the X-rays. With un-Dicklike caution he eased the hairpin into a chaos of fat asbestos-braided wires, then jerked back with a cackle as it shot sparks at him. “Still some juice stored up in those condensers,” he explained, “had to get rid of it before it got rid of me.”
Once their eyes had recovered from the lightning, they went to the machine’s power cord and tracked it across the floor to its plug, lying there in the dirt with its two gleaming blades like an equals sign. It was safe. Dick had the tube out, a blown-glass contraption about a foot long, sternly and wackily Victorian. “A filament there, like in a lightbulb; but electrons get boiled off of the metal and go flying over this-a-way, to this thing, which pulls ’em in with a positive charge. Did you know opposites attract?”
“Heard it somewhere. What’s your point?”
“They slam into the target like bullets from a tommy gun flying into an Irish bar, and whack electrons out of it. Other electrons drop down to fill the holes in the orbitals and—”
“Emit.”
“Yeah. X-rays they emit.”
“Of a certain frequency.”
“I never have to tell you anything twice, Dawn—”
“You’ve told me about a hundred times, but thanks.”
“If you could see ’em they’d be a color. Not a mess of colors like a sunset but pure color like a neon tube. And what Compton observed—well, hang on, that’s not true, others observed it but he explained it—was that if you shone X-rays of one color on matter, why, X-rays of another color—a different frequency—would come outta it. They would come out at an angle, like they had been deflected, and the angle of the deflection predicted the color.”
“Proving—?”
“That light is made of particles. Or at least that it acts that way sometimes. It’s as if you took green light from a neon tube and shone it through a piece of cellophane and it came out red, and bent. You can’t explain that if the light is a wave. The math just don’t work. But if it’s a photon? Easy-peasy! The Compton effect, voilà.”
Dawn found that all quite interesting but did not really understand why picking the lock, breaking into the shoe store, taking apart the machine, and waving the actual tube around had been necessary parts of the explanation. The mental image of a neon tube shining through cellophane had been sufficient.
Another remarkable fact was that, in the privacy of this shuttered stall, they could quite easily have started making out, perhaps even had sex. Not that she necessarily wanted to, not right away. But it seemed like the sort of detail that Dick might have noticed, given that he’d had an erection about fifty percent of the time she had known him. But he had been blinded to it by the penetrating light of science.
“See, this is about as far as we can go!” he said, missing a possible double entendre, holding up the X-ray tube like a chalice, or whatever holy object secular Jews reverenced at the Society for Ethical Culture. “This is some gizmo! A lot of energy! See those fat wires it’s hooked up to, those coils? You can only get the energy levels so far apart, working with the heavy atoms, way out in the M orbitals, where the transitions are huge and the X-rays are hard. Then you just hit a place where you can’t get any more energy, any harder rays, any more violet photons, just by making electrons hop around. To go beyond that, you gotta give up on electrons—on chemistry—and go to the nucleus. This here”—he gave the tube one more shake—“is fascinating, but it’s a dead end and that’s why they are mass-producing ’em in Schenectady and using ’em to sell shoes.”
He left her to ponder all of that while he knelt again and reassembled the machine. She had unconsciously sidestepped around so as to get between him and the door, just in case that erection put in an appearance.
“Better test it,” he muttered, and plugged it in. Then, as an afterthought, he got his fingertips under the edges of the lead slab and heaved it back up into its place, hiding the tube, which had begun to glow as its filament warmed up and began machine-gunning electrons at its heavy-metal target. Since the machine had failed to blow up or catch fire, the next phase of the test consisted of examining various found objects and body parts on the fluoroscopic screen, and peering sidelong into the foot slot to see whether blue light could be seen leaking out of it; for he had the idea that, at certain angles, Compton scattering should manifest itself as colored rays visible to the naked eye. But it didn’t quite work. He became frustrated and opened his notebook to make calculations.
“I should be getting back,” she said.
His head bobbed up. He looked not so much guilty as disoriented. “Sorry. I forgot Compton’s formula, so I’m just re-deriving it real quick.”
“That’s fine but I have to go.”
“I should walk you to the streetcar,” he intoned, as if he had forgotten manners and was having to re-derive them from first principles.
“That would be lovely but I can take care of myself.”
“No, I’ll do it. Any chance I can get back in here for more experiments?”
“All you need is a bobby pin, Dick. I could give you a whole box.” She was a little shocked to find herself going all pouty, all self-pitying. Dick didn’t really like her. He only wanted her for her X-ray tube.
“For some kinda experiments we would need the both of us,” he said, advancing.
That was more like it, but it was too soon. “Perhaps tomorrow,” she said.
He shook his head. “Hate to say it, but Dad got tickets to the Wild West roundup. A must-see.” His eyes wandered over the stacked shoeboxes as if they were squares on a calendar. “Next day though—big stuff happening. First thing in the morning.”
“What?”
“Meet me at dawn, Dawn. I’m taking you to Navy Pier.”
Stars did not shine in the sky of day, but these did. Ignited by the late-afternoon sun—for Dawn, Dick, and several thousands of others had been standing on Navy Pier since before the air armada had lifted off from the waters of the Rivière du Nord before Montreal—silver flares emerged from the haze above the lake. They arranged themselves into a rectilinear constellation that, as it passed high above Chicago, resolved itself into the letters ITALIA. Profoundly emotional men swept off their Panamas, placed them over their hearts, and sniffled into their neatly waxed mustaches.
Taking a more analytical view was Dick. “There’s more than twenty-four of ’em!” he announced. “Three dozen easy. No, more!” She knew him well enough to know that he had not actually counted the stars, but figured it out some other way, some geometrical logic telling him you couldn’t spell ITALIA with twenty-four points only, not if you put the crossbars on the I’s. “That’s gotta be the escort. Those are Uncle Sam’s, not Il Duce’s.”
The announcer, who all day had been updating the crowd by loudspeaker and the people of Chicago by radio as Air Marshal Balbo had dodged storms over Ontario, spat out the news that this was an Army Air Force group, three squadrons from near Detroit that had picked the Italians up as they’d roared over Lake Saint Clair and escorted them over U.S. territory.
The anticlimax produced a lull and a last-chance mobbing of the pier’s gruesomely overtaxed sanitary facilities. But in that silence could be heard the juicy rumble of forty-eight Fraschini motors, eighteen cylinders each, powering twenty-four planes low over Chicago on the final leg of their 7,000-mile argosy. Balbo, it seemed, had doglegged over the Century of Progress, where 60,000 awaited his Roman triumph in Soldier Field and further tens of thousands had swamped its electrical iridescence with acres of green-white-and-red banners.
In their eagerness to look south down the shore, the Navy Pier crowd surged toward its southern edge, pressing Dawn against the railing hard enough to leave a welt. Navy MPs blew whistles and shoved them back. A rescue rowboat scuttled across the slack water to extract a luckless spectator who’d fallen in, taking a long stretch of green-white-and-red bunting with him and leaving his hat bobbing on the lake like a bubble. The surge relaxed anyway as the air armada tacked west over the city, disappearing behind the rampart of stately buildings on Lake Shore Drive, and made a pass up the Loop. Its progress could be guessed at by observing the reactions of the thousands who had gathered on rooftops; arms waved like cilia and Italian flags stirred the sky in languid infinities. Finally the rumble broke out into the open as the planes rounded the northern end of the Miracle Mile and banked east over the lake. The tops of their wings were banded with the three colors of Italy and the black of the Fascists. In two stormi of twelve each they came, each stormo comprising four arrowhead-shaped flights of three.
When seen from above or below, the Savoia-Marchetti was identifiable as an aeroplane because of its huge single wing, so fat in the middle that the crew actually rode inside of it, looking forward through a row of portholes set into its leading edge. But from the front it looked like a pair of teardrop-shaped boats: two bullet-like hulls, with accommodations for passengers and cargo, suspended below the wing where they did double duty as pontoons. From the side the view was dominated by the engines, mounted back-to-back on a rakish gondola thrust high above the center of the wing, a pusher prop at its aft end and a puller to fore, stubby exhaust pipes like rows of spines on a dinosaur’s back, spurting an endless cyclical tattoo of gas-scented exhaust. The empennage of rudder and tailplane was dragged behind it at the end of some spindly pipestems, stiffened by a few cables; from a distance these were invisible, making it seem as if the tail was a separate, smaller aeroplane flying in close formation behind the wing/hull/gondola contraption. It seemed incredible that such constructs could get up out of the water at all, much less fly for thousands of miles, but none could doubt the proof of their being here. The strangeness of the design seemed to call into question the whole direction of American aviation.
The stormi banked in a vast turn south over the lake, curling west toward the city again and then north as they descended toward the yacht basin. The tips of their wings were blazoned with white rondels, each scored with three parallel black stripes. As they came closer it could be seen that each stripe had a little hook to one side of it, for these were stylized fasces. On the side of each hull was a more fully realized rendering in brown, showing the bundle of rods with the axe head peeking out. The lead plane of the lead flight of the lead stormo also sported a black star, the insignia of a general officer, marking it as the flagship of the armada. As this came in on its final approach, a wayward pleasure craft passed in front of it, to furious, palpable horn-blasting from a navy launch stationed there just to prevent such enormities. From Dawn and Dick’s point of view, looking almost straight-on into the portholes of the cockpit, it seemed a nearer thing than it was. In truth it was more embarrassment than hazard. The boat’s operator, putt-putting around the lake, alive only to the mundane hazards of shallow water and flotsam, perhaps wondering if he might profitably cast a line and hook a lunker, was infuriatingly and yet all too recognizably blind to the unheard-of, unprecedented prodigy of the greatest air armada in the history of the world bearing down upon him. He was a stand-in for all of the Midwest, and as such for all of America, making everyone blush from the shame to which he was so oblivious.
Balbo’s ship and its two flankers plowed a broad lane through the anchorage, and Dawn imagined she could feel a warm gust as everyone on the pier exhaled. Revving its engines back up to reclaim a bit of speed, Balbo’s flight veered, howling and smoking, round the end of the pier, accepting a salute from a Navy destroyer tied up at its end, and idled to a triad of green-white-and-red buoys recently placed there for their use. It was just to the north side of the pier.
A hatch opened. A swagger stick, then a cigarette, and finally a stocky, swarthy, bearded man emerged, followed closely by a sword. He was in a handsome blue-and-gray uniform, belted high at the waist. His chest and shoulders gleamed with medals and golden eagles. Puffing on his cigarette, he began to strut up and down the giant wing as his sailor-airmen made the ship fast and tended to the engines.
This, as all of Chicago knew, was Air Marshal Italo Balbo. The lengthy run-up to his exploit and the several days of its execution had given the newspapers plenty of time to rake over his biographical details. He was one of the four Blackshirt quadrumvirs who had led the Fascist march on Rome eleven years ago, inspiring Hitler to the decidedly less effective Beer Hall Putsch a year later. If anything bad happened to Mussolini (a consummation devoutly to be wished by everyone in the kommunalka), Balbo would probably succeed him as dictator of the Italian Empire.
Doing their utmost to make him feel welcome was a contingent of young locals in new black sateen shirts, black neckties, pinstriped trousers, and meticulously oiled hair who forced their way to the brink of the pier, snapped to attention, and gave him the Fascist salute while making a strange noise in their throats that Dawn guessed must be some manner of cheer or battle cry. Balbo turned his head to look, then returned the salute in a more casual style, swinging his hand out from his chest, pausing for a moment at full extension, then letting it swing wide and down, as if he were only waving.
The proceedings became dull and tense. All of the Savoia-Marchettis had to touch down, taxi, and be made fast before Balbo would consent to board the destroyer at the head of the pier, where a menagerie of Chicago pols, archbishops, debutantes, radio announcers, polo players, industrialists, Italian princelings, diplomats, movie stars, and admirals waited to subject him to some grueling program of salutations. Less exalted VIPs had been relaxing all afternoon in a shaded grandstand at the end of the pier, but groundlings such as Dick and Dawn could only stand, wait, and sort of tread water in the hot stew of the crowd, trying to stay together as those trapped in the center tried to force their way to the edges for a peep at Balbo or a breath of fresh air. They heard and felt the nineteen-gun salute as Balbo finally boarded the destroyer, and heard its band playing, and saw the smoke from its stacks as it cast off for the short cruise down the lake to the next echelon of greetings at Century of Progress, where more Blackshirts waited to salute the hero at the Italian pavilion and the sixty thousand were listening to staccato narration over the loudspeaker system at Soldier Field.
Balbo’s departure set off further turbulence in the Pier crowd, which had no plausible way of getting out of this place other than lake steamers. Ever since the fair had opened, a fleet of these had been shuttling between Navy Pier and Century of Progress on half-hour schedules. Now they were out in force and taking on passengers as fast as they could, the MPs blowing their whistles and pushing the crowd back from the gangplanks just as soon as they became fully loaded. The crowd surged in the direction of each looming smokestack, only to stall as the approaches became choked. Dawn, simultaneously vexed and bored, found some entertainment in watching Dick, who was neither; she could tell he was trying to make sense of the crowd’s movements, tantalizingly on the verge of some insight that would enable him to stand in just the right place to be squirted aboard the next steamer, not by forcing his way past others but by letting himself be entrained in their natural flow. Once or twice, it almost worked; picking up some weak signal in the postures of those around him, Dick would reach out for her hand, she’d give it to him, and he would lead her into a slim rivulet of pedestrians making inexplicable progress toward a gangplank.
They came within yards of a place where people were flooding aboard a lake steamer, only to be frustrated by a thin screen of downstaters too well behaved to take the opportunity given. She could sense by Dick’s posture that he was just going to play the New York card and force his way between them, pulling her along in his wake. Then they were cut off by a flying wedge of Blackshirts. Dick tightened his grip on her hand. She sensed he was getting ready to leap in behind them.
She was knocked off balance by a man, and then a second man, stepping in from behind her, exploiting an almost nonexistent gap to their left, like a couple of linebackers spearing in through a seam between the guard and the tackle. They moved, but scarcely looked, like ruffians; their hair, beneath the brims of their snap-brim hats, was short and freshly cut, and sweat ran down the clean-shaven backs of their necks to dampen white collars that had been crisply starched that morning. The one in the lead was twice Dick’s size, and the one behind him was bigger yet; as Dick made to sidestep through the same gap, the first one shrugged him aside. In the same moment the larger man was body-blocking Dawn out of his path.
“Hey, Joe Palooka, what’s the big idea?” Dick protested. The first of the two men was already past him, and past caring. Dick put his hand on the shoulder of the second man, who, in a graceful response, without really breaking stride, turned to face Dick, allowing Dick to get a look at his barrel chest, then peeled back one side of his suit jacket to reveal a brass credential. Then he was past them and hustling across the gangplank, and Dick, forgetting his indignation and seeing his chance, lurched into the space that they had made. Dawn’s mind was telling her not to get on that boat, but her legs had not yet got the message. She tried to let go of Dick’s hand but he had got her by the wrist already. Her trim, stylish oxfords took her in a scattered and disarranged gait over the boards and they were on the steamer, no hope of going back as people were piling on behind them, the two palookas still right in front of them and the Blackshirts, having formed a sort of phalanx, forcing their way up a stair to an upper deck where they could see the air armada. Dick seemed inclined to follow those guys, but Dawn pulled back hard, diverting him around the base of the stairs and off-balancing him so that he had to follow her for a moment. The two of them banged into a life preserver. An instinct was telling her to seek out quiet, close spaces, to go belowdecks.
Above them the Blackshirts made their war cry again, and she heard it better: something like “Eja Eja Alala!”
“Hey, that guy had a badge and a gun,” Dick remarked. “He’s some kinda special agent or something. Hey, where we going, Dawn?”
Away from the special agent with the badge and the gun, Dawn was thinking. Away from Silent Al—before he recognizes me. And forgets about the ridiculous Blackshirts. And decides to slap the cuffs on a real Communist.
She’d been very lucky: Al, focused on the Blackshirts, had only seen her from behind. She was a distinctive looker in lots of ways, but the Century of Progress bob was as different as it could be from the braided ponytail she had worn most of the time Al had known her last year in D.C. So she had not been recognizable from that angle. But Silent Al had spent a lot of time, in those days, looking at her, to the point where people had noticed, and guessed he must be sweet on her. Which maybe he was. Either way, if he saw her face-on, he’d know her.
They were in a steel corridor belowdecks. She tried a hatch, found that it opened, went into a dark space beyond, a sort of closet full of pipes and valve wheels. Only when she’d closed the door behind her did she feel safe.
“Hey, we’re not supposed to be in here!” Dick said. She could not see the puckish look that must have been on his face, but she could hear it in his voice.
“Like you care about that, Dick!”
“What’s going on?” he asked.
There were only two possible answers that would pass Dick’s logical filters. One was that she was a wanted, fugitive Communist in immediate danger of being recognized and arrested by a Division of Investigation agent who’d spent much of the previous year following her around.
The other—
She groped out, found his shoulders with her hands, followed them up his neck to his face, and drew it in to hers.