6

Chicago

June 1932

By the time the Chicago Communist Party Central Committee mobilized, the bulls had given up on trying to stop veterans from hopping eastbound freights. Many of the bulls were veterans. All were patriotic. Anyway, it was unstoppable. Some of the railways had begun adding empty boxcars to eastbound trains just to clear frustrated Bonus Marchers out of their yards. For, following the example of their commander, Walter W. Waters, the men of the Bonus Expeditionary Forces had become expert at soaping rails and disconnecting brake lines. The economy was at a standstill. Idle rolling stock was about as useful as canoes in a desert. Sending a few boxcars east to clear a freight yard of such nuisances was more than worth it. So, far from hiding, Papa’s band of Reds lit an open fire as they waited for their train to marshal, boiled up a kettle of slum, and played a madcap baseball game, tripping over rails and vaulting stacks of ties as they ran after long fly balls.

A cop and a bull strolled by to pass the time of day with them and pass out smokes. When they came to Papa—who was reclining in the shade of a boxcar, reading a book—their tone changed. Dawn, sitting inside the boxcar, sewing a hammer and sickle onto an expanse of red fabric, listened.

“Fellas are saying you’re the leader,” said the cop in flat Chicago vowels.

“Then I reckon I am,” Papa said, “until they say somebody else is.”

“What kind of accent is that?”

“American.”

“Don’t be smart.”

“Polish,” guessed the bull, and just from that one word Dawn could tell he was Irish.

“Good guess,” Papa said. “Russian. Technically, Ukrainian.”

“But it’s all part of the same country now, eh?” said the cop.

“Not so much a country as an international movement, Officer.”

“You part of that movement?”

“I’m proud to say I am.”

“What’s a Red Russian doing on a veterans’ march?”

“I’m a Red American,” Papa said, “and a veteran.”

“Prove it.”

Papers rustled. Dawn also heard the pop of a baseball into a mitt, a groan from one of the sides. “Why aren’t you playing baseball like the others?” asked the bull. “You appear spry.”

“Looks can be deceiving. My lungs have seen better days.”

“Says here he’s right,” said the cop. “Says here he’s on fifty percent disability. ’Cause of his lungs.”

“Aw, that’s a shame,” said the bull. “Tuberculosis?”

“Gas,” Papa said. “Half of my platoon bought the farm. I got my mask on a few heartbeats sooner.”

“It’s all in order,” said the cop. “Just don’t be raising any Red trouble around here.”

Dawn knew what Papa was thinking, what he wanted to say: The trouble’s all being created by your paymasters; we’re just trying to put a stop to it. “Thank you, Officer. But if that was what I wanted, I wouldn’t be hopping a train out of town, would I?”

“That smart mouth of yours is going to earn you a licking,” said the cop. But he moved on.

 

“Now you can see why I was insistent on all of you having your papers in order,” Papa said later to the committee: half a dozen men and women, all card-carrying members of the Wobblies and of the Communist Party, and all bona fide veterans or war widows. The train had pulled out of the yard an hour earlier; they were meeting at one end of a car. “The only reason the Bonus Expeditionary Force is allowed to exist is that the forces of capital are afraid to be seen crushing a movement of men who fought their war for them. Commander Waters is savvy enough to know that if his camps in D.C. are found to have been infiltrated by poseurs, why, then it’s all over. Comrade Browder tried to enter the main camp down in Anacostia and was turned away at the gates. Not because he’s the head of the party but because he’s not a veteran. That little shakedown? Just a dress rehearsal for what we can expect later.”

“I heard otherwise,” said Booker Pryor. “I heard tell Commander Waters is turning a little brown around the edges.” Everyone looked at him curiously. “No, not brown like me! As in the Brownshirts. He’s going fascist. Purging the Communists. That’s what I heard anyway.”

“I’m sure he’s under great pressure from the Bureau of Investigation and other organs of the reactionary puppet government to make a show of being Red-free. Whether he is sincere, or just using a little common sense, is a thing I mean to find out. Our revolutionary comrades have scouted other locations in D.C., even closer to the centers of power, where we can lodge if there is tactical advantage to be gained by maintaining the appearance of separation from Commander Waters.”

Later, after the train had curved east around the shore of Lake Michigan and the sun was going down over the prairie, Papa invited Dawn to clamber out onto the back of the caboose and enjoy the evening air. Seeing his union card, the engineers were happy to let them pass time there.

“A red sunset,” he pointed out, inevitably.

“They’re all red,” Dawn said, “because of the dust, because of the drought.” She loved him, but it made her weary that he was only capable of talking about one thing.

“Just let me be poetic for a moment, my dear young scientist.” Papa didn’t smoke, because it riled up his lungs, but he did chew. He had a wad going. His eyes watered and he leaned over the railing to spit onto the tracks. They were well clear of the city, passing through a cut lined with scrubby growth save where hobos had hacked it all down and built long, skinny shantytowns on the right of way, canvas roofs and clotheslines caressing the sides of the passing trains. The train was clacking along fast enough that neither hobos nor mosquitoes could catch it, slow enough that the wind wasn’t a menace.

“You were born into a red dawn and now, even though I don’t believe in superstitions, I think that these red sunsets mean something. The sun is setting on your childhood. You’re a grown woman now. Only sixteen, I know, but you’ve experienced more than most women twice your age, and that counts for something. You’re so big and strong, I can’t believe you’re my daughter.”

I’m not, she might have told him. While you were on a tramp steamer to Liverpool to organize dockworkers, you were cuckolded by a six-foot-four-inch stickup man named Jim O’Faolain, who was hanged a month after I was born. She said nothing, though, letting him enjoy her. Being gazed at by men, she had learned, was as much a part of the natural order of things as gravity. More so when you were five foot eleven and freckled. She wore jeans; all she had was jeans. No one cared on the ranch. On the El, riding to the hospital to see Ma, women in skirts and pearls would look her up and down and make it clear that they did not approve. Men would stare in a way that, on a ranch, would have led to violence. Being gazed at, with affection, by a man who believed he was looking at his daughter, was quite tolerable by comparison, as warm as the low heat of the setting sun.

“So there’ll be a short summer night and then a new dawn,” he said. “It’s going to happen in D.C.”

“What is?”

“It’s the Petrograd of America. Even the geography is the same—the rivers, the drawbridges, the palaces of capital, the military bases full of enlisted men toiling under the whip of the officer class, just waiting for their moment. It’ll be the Great July Revolution or the Great August Revolution, depending.”

So far, nothing she hadn’t heard before—the same dreamy talk he would exchange with the men around the table at the kommunalka while the women cooked for them.

“It’s time to talk about what your role is going to be.”

“Making kasha? I forgot the recipe.”

He laughed. “I always saw you as more of a Veronika.”

This felt to her as a secret violated. Of course he’d have noticed Veronika, talked to her, thought about her. But Dawn had wanted her all to herself. Papa did not really know Veronika, what she had suffered, how it had made her. Otherwise he would never have uttered such a curse.

“Obviously,” he continued, “I never had good relations with your mother’s side of the family.”

My only family.

“Now I need something from them. Because they don’t like me, don’t trust me, I need you to be a, a—”

“Go-between?”

“Agent.”

“What is it we need from them?” The question was a formality; she knew the answer would be whisky. Whisky he could slip to D.C. cops and pols, trade for food, smuggle into the BEF’s camps and flops and shantytowns to get in their good graces.

“Tommy guns,” he said. “And, if possible, hand grenades.”

She must have looked at him funny.

“Oh, I have money,” he said.

 

At Ft. Wayne, where three great lines intertangled, there was a day’s pause as they awaited a Norfolk Western train bound south and east. The layout of the place and the manner of its workings would have baffled them were it not for the sages of the adjoining Hooverville: wizardly hobos who had nothing to do but squat back in the cover of the sumac jungle and observe. They knew every locomotive on the system and could recognize every engineer from miles away by his touch on the whistle. They could say which bulls were best avoided and which might look the other way as a platoon of revolutionaries clambered up into a string of boxcars.

They encountered half a dozen half-starved Kansas City Communists who had come in a few days earlier. They’d been part of a larger, mixed contingent that had convened a sort of tribunal, found them guilty of being Reds—which was true enough—and cast them out before boarding an eastbound freight. Papa and Booker spent the better part of an evening chewing the fat with them over a small campfire before accepting them. Their leader was Rusty Krieger, an old Arizona mining-camp Wobbly, known by reputation. The others were newer recruits from packing plants and railyards. One of these, a lad named Al Larson, was obviously too young to be a vet, even supposing he’d lied about his age. But he had papers proving that he was the only son and heir of a marine who’d fought at Belleau Wood and come home with a wound that had eventually killed him. Al had been making himself useful with his knowledge of railway lore and had become Rusty’s chief deputy. So from then on, when Papa held meetings of his central committee, Al and Rusty participated.

A day later they were eastbound again on a Norfolk Western freight that would take them to within striking distance of the capital. Getting on a train had been more difficult than in Chicago, until it had suddenly turned easy. Papa confided in Dawn what she’d already guessed—namely that he had dipped into his stash to pay someone off. His hand strayed thoughtlessly toward the breast of his jacket, where Dawn saw cack-handed stitching and more bulk than her sunken-chested Papa could account for on his own.

 

“Why don’t you just order tommy guns from Sears Roebuck like everyone else?” she’d asked him one evening, not long before, after she’d recovered from his surprising request for fully automatic weapons.

“You don’t understand,” Papa had said, “we need lots of them. You have to think about practicalities.” He had paused for a moment, eyes watering, and she had known he was remembering the gas attack, when there’d been plenty of gas masks—just not handy. “When that red banner you sewed gets hoisted above the Treasury Building, or the Capitol, or whichever building we decide to use as our Winter Palace, we’re not going to have time to break open the crates from Sears, wipe the grease off of the parts, assemble them, and then kill another half an hour shoving cartridges into magazines.”

“Ordering a lot of them at once—”

“Would lead to General Robert E. Wood picking up his phone at Sears headquarters in Chicago and placing a long-distance call to the offices of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation,” Papa had said with a smile.

“In Montana I’ve seen one tommy gun. One.”

“But there’s a place world-famous for having a surplus.”

“Chicago, sure.”

“And your relatives know those people. Deal with them.”

“The people you’re talking about like their tommy guns, Pop.”

“Prohibition’s done for. That era is passing. And you can bet they over-bought. That’s the mentality. Why buy three tommy guns when you can afford thirty? Mark my word. They’re sitting in speakeasy basements all over Chicago, and Bugs Moran is saying, ‘The handwriting’s on the wall; Rockefeller just came out for Repeal, Roosevelt’s going to lick Hoover in a few months, what use are tommy guns to a legit operation?’ It’s a buyer’s market, Dawn.”

“You sound like a capitalist.”

“We must use the human materiel and the goods provided us by capitalism to destroy it.”

“How would we get them the money?”

“I hid it in Chicago. A down payment, and the balance, in separate locations. All we need to do is send a cable.”

“Why didn’t we do this before we left?”

“Do you remember last week, when I asked you whether any of your cousins happened to be in town?”

She nodded. The answer had been no. So it would all have to be done anyway through letters, cables, telephone. More important to get to D.C., to scout the battlefield, than to tarry at home fussing over logistics. Communists, outlaws, and gangsters all knew how to be discreet.

 

The train felt its way east, all the topography conspiring against it. Rusty Krieger made it clear, by his way of talking and his choice of topics, that he was a lonely man, more interested in camaraderie than revolution. It was well known that he had been a hellraiser of the first water during the Wobblies’ salad days, and Papa made a point of paying homage whenever an opportunity arose. But there was something about his glib recitation of old slogans and his tiresome bids to get everyone singing old Wobbly songs that made the younger Chicago Communists exchange looks. They looked to Papa, too, but rather than meet their eyes he only gazed poker-faced at Rusty. Al Larson, by contrast, never got a word in edgewise, and soon had a nickname.

“Silent Al’s sweet on you,” Booker told her during a break on an Ohio Valley side track. “He got the wandering eye, does Al. Oh, he knows how to hide it. His mama raised him right. But Booker can see it.”

She didn’t doubt him; seeing things was Booker’s job, and that’s why Papa kept him around, invited him to meetings, talked with him afterward.

“He is a polite young man,” she said, “I could do worse.”

“Aww, you had me there for a second!” he said, after a double-take.

“I’m not altogether joking,” she said. “Got to start somewhere. And if he has an eye for a hobo in blue jeans—”

“Let me tell you something, girl,” Booker said. “I almost called you child, but this is not child talk. When it comes down to it, men do not care. They got an eye for everything.”

“Then why do women—”

“Women dress that way for each other. You want to make friends with a girl, you go get yourself all dressed up. With a boy? Better think twice.”

“Not even Silent Al?”

“Just don’t sell yourself short, is all I’m saying. Just because you wear blue jeans.” He nodded, a parting shot as he strolled away: “You gonna be turning heads in D.C.” And then he disappeared into a swirl of orange campfire sparks, green fireflies, and blue-white stars.

 

One more train change got them into D.C. on a freight all but expropriated by the Bonus Expeditionary Forces: swarming with thousands of veterans, widows, wives, children from all over, whites and coloreds mixed up like Dawn had never seen. She had no idea where they were, but some of the men did, and as word spread up and down the train, they began to open suitcases and take out such odds and ends of uniforms as had survived the decade and a half since Armistice Day. Water was heated over Sterno, scraps of soap passed from hand to hand so that each man got enough to shave. A colored barber from Alabama set up shop in the open side door of a boxcar, flicking suds and whiskers off his straight razor onto the siding.

D.C. had little industry and did not spread into the surrounding country like Chicago. So it surprised them. A white spike and a white bubble were on the horizon, and all were looking at them, unwilling to believe that these were actually the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome. A rough chorus of “America the Beautiful” broke out, to the immense pleasure of Rusty Krieger, and then “Over There.”

After their long hobos’ journey, Dawn was expecting an improvised and helter-skelter progress through Washington, but in fact it was organized better than many actual military operations. A sort of honor guard was drawn up, waiting for them at the north end of the Potomac Yard, flags flying and drums rattling. Cops were there, too, ranked on motorcycles, and Glassford, the chief of police, known to be a friend of the Bonus Marchers. Flatbed trucks waited to convey women, children, amputees, and grizzled Spanish-American War vets. Dawn found herself shunted to one of these. Even though she was more capable of marching than many of the vets, she accepted the lift because she was burdened with bulky luggage such as the banner, which was all folded up in an army duffel bag. She and the other women of the Chicago contingent looked after that and the other big stuff—Dutch oven, canned beans, tools, tents—and cheered for the men as they fell in, formed ranks, saluted the flag, and began marching out, ten abreast, preceded by the drum-and-bugle corps and Chief Glassford, paced by motorcycle cops, and followed by the trucks.

They had been studying maps during their journey. Otherwise, she’d have been hopelessly confused. Senators might enter D.C. from the north, detraining at Union Station, but hobos, Bonus Marchers, and Bolsheviks approached from the west and jumped down from their boxcars in a huge yard on the Virginia bank of the Potomac. The first leg of their march, then, took them a couple of miles north up the bank to the first available bridge, which carried them northeast across the river and over some parks and waterways before bearing north in the general direction of the Washington Monument. Just short of the Mall they turned right onto a course that would take them along the southern front of the Capitol. It became a regular parade, complete with spectators lining the streets, waving flags, and holding up signs saying things like bonus now and support our vets! Near the Capitol, fleshy, self-assured men in light summer suits were out shaking hands. Someone said they were congressmen. They paused at an intersection; Rusty let himself down off the truck, explaining that, as a non-veteran, he’d best go no farther. Laying a finger aside of his nose he said that he had a place to stay with some comrades. As the truck began moving again he reached out and grabbed the top strap of the duffel bag with the red banner, dragged it off, and slung it over his shoulder. Dawn was relieved to see it, and him, disappearing into the crowd.

Once they were past the Capitol, the neighborhood changed decisively. The sun told her they were bending south, her inner ear that they were canted downhill. The faces on the sidewalk became mostly colored, with the exception of one stretch that was all navy men, cheering them on—there was even a navy band playing. Water appeared in their way: a river, spanned by a bridge. Remembering Papa’s remarks about Petrograd, Dawn took note of the fact that it was a drawbridge. She scanned for the control tower, which would have to be first stormed and then defended. Everyone was guessing that this was the Potomac again, but Dawn knew it to be Anacostia Creek. Plotted on a map, their route was a giant horseshoe, the destination almost directly across the river from Potomac Yard, where they’d first jumped off the boxcars. Ahead there was some indiscipline in the ranks as men in the left files craned and jostled for a view to the right; some broke ranks altogether, ran to the bridge’s right-hand railing, and waved hats, flags, whatever they had. As the truck bumped out onto the span, Dawn and the other women saw why. On the creek’s opposite bank, downstream along its gradual junction with the Potomac, was the biggest Hooverville she had ever seen: the usual improvised shacks and tents but laid out with precision on a grid of mud streets. A big green Salvation Army tent stood on the near end. There was a large open area spattered with lozengy puddles and engraved with the huge white glyph that, only in North America, meant baseball. Rising above the middle of the shantytown was a wooden platform that she first took for a gallows. But flags flew from it, and someone was on top, not being hanged but in a hortative posture, the apex of a large cone pressed to his lips. Of the drab groundlings below, some listened and others went on about their business. Much of this seemed to involve the relocation of large random objects: tree branches, automobile seats, sheets of cardboard and plywood. Following their trail down the bank, Dawn saw that much of this had been quarried from a dump that ran like a levee between the town and the edge of the water. To the extent that there was an edge; for in truth the boundary between river and bank was not as crisp as one might wish for in a plumbing-free development supporting tens of thousands of humans. Men were wading out, soap-clutching fists flailing above their heads, trying to find water deep enough to bathe in. Women gathered in little societies to launder clothes.

“No panhandling, no liquor, no radical talk” were the rules posted above the flaps of the big tent, which served as a sort of gateway to Camp Marks—as this whole place had been dubbed in honor of a local cop who had befriended the first Bonus Marchers. For the benefit of new arrivals who did not know how to read, or could not afford glasses, the same rules were barked out by the khaki-shirted myrmidons who were checking everyone’s papers.

Papa had not gone in but had waited for Dawn, since she would need his credentials to be admitted. She found him reclining in a strip of shade alongside a tent, a wet bandanna on his forehead. She helped pull him to his feet. He made a remark about enjoying the nap, but she suspected that the long march in the July sun had knocked him flat. His breathing was labored, his sentences short. “No radical talk,” he repeated as they made their way through the tent. It was warm in there and crowded, and smelled of unwashed bodies. There was a lending library where men were browsing, and dumps of donated clothing where ragged women appraised worn boys’ dungarees and stained calico dresses at arm’s length.

Papa led Dawn out into what she took for the main street of Camp Marks. The speaking platform was a hundred yards along. “Notice . . . it’s not ‘no Reds.’ They just want us . . . to keep quiet. Fine. For now. Smart.”

Dawn was of a mind that Papa might be reading too much into it—a common failing of Soviet intellectuals in America—but was distracted by a round of applause from the crowd of mostly new arrivals who had gathered around the platform. A speaker had just been introduced. At a distance Dawn took him for a senior military officer, but as they drew closer she noted that his khakis—though spotless, starched, and pressed—bore no insignia, and that they hung slack on a gaunt frame. His blond head was protected not by an officer’s cap but by a fedora. “Gotta be Commander Waters,” Papa said.

Waters was flanked by a couple of men also in khaki getups that did not quite rise to the description of uniform. They were junior, but they weren’t young—few young men were in the camp since they were all vets of a war that had ended fifteen years ago. Younger dependents like Dawn and Silent Al were exceptional. Dawn could also see a cream-colored parasol up on the platform, and as they worked their way into the crowd she saw it was in the white-gloved grip of a tall lady who fanned herself from time to time with a copy of the BEF News. Perhaps because of this ladylike paragon, exposed on the platform; perhaps because of what Booker had said about turning heads; or perhaps because of the soggy warmth of the sun pounding the Anacostia Flats, Dawn felt the heat of many men’s eyes on her. She was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, cowboy-style, which a man requested she take off. Not knowing how to take that, she instead moved laterally, skirting toward the edge of the crowd, and lost contact with Papa for a time.

“Commander” Waters (she understood now that the title was an affectation) gave a speech about how he had fought Pancho Villa and the Huns like every man jack here and found himself drifting around the Yakima Valley and Oregon doing honest work only to find himself jobless, and how he and a few hundred veterans had started the BEF in Portland only a few short weeks ago and ridden the rails from coast to coast, picking up supporters all the way, like a snowball rolling downhill. That part made for a good story. But then he wandered off into talk of how things were organized and who was in charge of what and when Congress was going to adjourn next. Dry-as-dust subject matter, strangely charged with emotion for him. She found her attention wandering. “He keeps resigning,” explained an old-timer, “and refuses to come back until they give him his way.”

“‘Dictatorial powers,’ I heard is what he asked for,” said a new man.

“And was given. Only way to get anything done in an operation like this,” said a third. This little debating society was quashed by rough, indignant voices. Waters talked of all the people who were helping them with food, clothes, and medical care, and introduced Mrs. Cahoon—the lady with the parasol—who stepped forward to applause and then addressed the small minority of women in the crowd, letting them know that there were actual proper houses where they could stay if they wanted to spare themselves and their children the rigors of Camp Marks, and telling them where to get donated clothes, of which they now had an embarrassment.

 

They had brought surplus army tents from Chicago. They pitched these at the limit of the camp, only to find themselves deeply embedded in it a day later as new arrivals continued to march in. Dawn awoke to reveille one morning and realized she’d already lost count of the days. For the feeling of the place was of a great thing happening, but nothing ever occurred. Yes, a bugler sounded reveille each morning. Some men fell in, out of habit, and did calisthenics and marched about. But they were an army with no guns, no chain of command, no enemy, and no mission. Between reveille and taps they consumed time with epidemics of rumor and the laborious framing of plans that were gradually forgotten as attention drifted to food. Small children were dying in the camp, and not from disease. Dawn had not been plump to begin with, but she had to borrow a leather punch to add some new holes to the belt she was using to keep her jeans from collapsing around her ankles.

The woman with the parasol turned up from time to time. Papa knew the correct spelling of her last name: Colquhoun. Maiden name Flynn. She was from a family of New York pols, Tammany Hall figures, who’d made a lot of money from Prohibition, and she’d married into a family rich from newspaper publishing. Papa, weak from a combination of hunger and the effect that the fetid atmosphere of the Anacostia Flats had on his lungs, kept sending Dawn on missions. “Try to get noticed by Ida Colquhoun,” he said. So Dawn volunteered to help sort through the bales of old clothing that arrived from time to time at the Salvation Army tent, sometimes accompanied by Mrs. Colquhoun and sometimes not. The lady volunteers who staffed the place were known as Sallies.

Dawn’s more important task took her across the drawbridge into D.C., where, in a Capitol Hill telegraph office, she penciled out the following cable to Montana: strong local demand wolf circle prevention need men chicago delay more expensive than haste. She’d lain awake all night devising the wording. Seeing it penciled out on the Western Union form she feared it was too clever by half. The queer looks she was collecting from the men in their summer suits and the women in their pearls did nothing to ease her mind.

Just how ludicrously conspicuous Dawn was, was a thing difficult to explain to Papa. She entered into a sort of cosmetic bootstrapping project. Mrs. Colquhoun’s donors were insensitive to Camp Marks’s skewed sex ratio, and so there was a comic oversupply of women’s attire. Dawn mined out a skirt that had probably been donated because it was unfashionably long. But on her frame it fell halfway between knee and ankle, which was the current style. She was no seamstress, but with a bit of work she was able to get it into a condition that, at least, would not cause fashionable girls to laugh at her from a block away. Then she found a blouse. It didn’t matter that the sleeves were miles too short because she rolled them up in the summer heat anyway. Then a pair of shoes too small, but enough to get her to a shoe store, where she spent some of the Comintern’s money on a pair that she could walk in. Thus attired, she returned to Western Union to collect the following return message: two men on eb tomorrow say hi billy bach fort myer

“Who’s Billy Bach?” Papa asked, back at Camp Marks, before feeding it to the fire. He’d already figured out that “EB” was the Empire Builder.

“Billy used to work in the polo stables around Gillette,” Dawn said. “Local boy. A couple of years older than me, I think. I guess he must have enlisted.”

“Politics?”

“Oh, his people are German Catholics, very traditional. The only thing we had in common was mucking out stables together.”

“But your people stayed in touch with him.”

“Yes.” It is what normal human beings do.

“The economy ist kaput,” Papa said, filling in the rest. “The family dirt farm has blown off in the general direction of Nebraska. This peasant boy, his good judgment, if he ever had any, narcotized by some backwoods priest, enlists in the army as an alternative to starvation. It’s discovered he knows everything about polo. Of course he would end up at Fort Myer.”

Dawn’s memory of Billy Bach was much more favorable than the picture that Papa seemed to be conjuring up in his head. She tried to let it roll off her back. “How does that follow?” she asked.

“Go there and you’ll see. It’s right across the Potomac. You can almost see it from here.”

“Still. Aren’t there other things I could be doing?”

By way of an answer, Papa let his gaze wander slowly around the camp. A black man and a white man were carrying the rusty hood of a Model T, obviously planning a shelter project. The white man slipped on some greasy mud and went down. Closer to the river, another man squatted over a slit trench, his anus bugling. “A tinderbox is full of fascinating potentialities,” Papa said, “but until the spark is kindled, it is not such an interesting place.”

“Okay,” Dawn said, “but I’ll be surprised if Billy remembers me.”

“That’s not why I want you to go. I want you to go because Fort Myer is the closest cavalry base to central D.C. and so that is where the counterattack will come from. I am asking you to conduct military espionage.”

“I need a haircut,” she blurted. “A brassiere. Kotex. I know you’ll say they are luxuries. But I can’t conduct espionage when other women are picking me out from a quarter of a mile away as some kind of vagrant.” And she was ready with other arguments she had marshaled, but a switch went on in Papa’s head and he cut her off with “Tradecraft.”

“What?”

“Of course you can spend money on tradecraft. Hell, you might as well, since we can’t spend it on food.” He referred to the fact that all food at Camp Marks was prepared and served in a communal mess. A week earlier, some pork had come in from sympathetic New York City meatpackers; for the past three days, however, the Bonus Army had subsisted on cracked wheat.

“In fact, you might just want to move out of this place,” Papa went on. “WESL has a decent squat at around Thirteenth and B Southwest.” WESL was the unfortunate name of the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League, the Red wing of the Bonus Army. “Rusty would take you in.”

“If I get lice,” she said, “then I’ll move.”

Pages of old Washington Posts drifted around camp, read and re-read until they were torn into strips and used for toilet paper. Papa had eyes only for the front pages, with their news of FDR’s nomination, Hoover’s desperate gambits to prop up the rotting corpse of capitalism. Red revolution in Peru and Brazil, the rise of the Steel Helmets in Germany. More popular, hence harder to come by, were the sports pages. Mostly these covered the deeds of Ruth and Gehrig on the first page, racing on the second. When polo was covered it was invariably on the first page, shouldering aside the minor baseball stories. But unlike baseball games, which happened every day, polo tournaments came and went; some issues of the Post were stuffed with information, others had nothing. Dawn assembled a pocket archive of polo coverage and studied it while on the streetcar, waiting for the hairdresser, getting soup and a sandwich at a lunch counter. These were all stages in the bootstrapping. The streetcar wouldn’t stop for an obvious vagrant. A girl with lice in her hair would be ejected from the beauty parlor. The coffee shop might not serve a solitary young woman who wasn’t up to a certain standard of grooming. The lingerie saleswoman looked askance at her but, seeing the fashionably short haircut, gave her the benefit of the doubt. Undergirded by the new brassiere, she did not feel out of place at Woodward & Lothrop buying a blouse that actually fit. There the scents and hues on display in Cosmetics caught her attention, but she thought better of embarking on any such experiments now, without a mother or a girlfriend to let her know when she was making a fool of herself. The objective—the reason this could be passed off to the Comintern as tradecraft—was to draw as little attention as possible. She felt she’d got it right when her next visit to Western Union earned her no looks save the kind any six-foot-in-heels girl had to get used to.

It was a lot of coming and going, and at Papa’s suggestion she took advantage of it to familiarize herself with the other Bonus Army bases around the city. The two most important were Camp Glassford, named after the vet-friendly D.C. police chief, and the WESL squat, where most of the Communists were staying.

Camp Glassford was directly west of the Capitol on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue. She had been told as much but, until she went there and saw it, could not believe how close it was. Other than a few hundred yards of trees and grass, nothing stood between the Capitol and the abandoned Ford dealership that served as Camp Glassford’s HQ.

The WESL squat was distributed over a square block a short distance southeast of the Washington Monument, nearer the White House than the Capitol, and not nearly as conspicuous as Camp Glassford. In addition to those two there were several other buildings around town crammed with Bonus Army marchers.

From those yellowed Post pages she learned the names of the local polo teams: the Fort Humphreys Engineers, the Sixteenth Field Artillery. The 110th. Two War Department teams, the Blues and the Whites. The Quantico Marines. But the best teams were the Greens and the Yellows of the Third Cavalry, based at Fort Myer. She scanned the scores, read the stories to get a sense of who the best players were: Davis, Meany, Patton, Macphail, Truscott. Mostly captains and majors. The big matches and tournaments were held at Potomac Park, which was the tongue of land you looked at when you stood at the edge of Camp Marks and gazed across Anacostia Creek.

Fort Myer was farther up the river, synonymous to most with Arlington Cemetery. So it was there that she went on a streetcar mostly full of tourists, if that was the right word for widows and parents carrying flowers to lay on graves. Myer was a pocket pistol of a base, half planted in dead soldiers, so she’d really have had to work at it to get lost. Its back half supported the usual hierarchy of barracks and junior and senior officers’ housing, skewed toward the top end since this was where the army’s top brass lived. These surrounded open ground policed for stray leaves and litter by enlisted men. To one end was a whole equine civilization: massed stables combed by lanes where horses were being led to and fro by grooms. Some were cavalry mounts, others polo ponies. The latter, she figured, ought to be finished with their afternoon trot and should be getting groomed, munching a light snack of hay as amuse-bouche for their 5 p.m. graining. Unlike bigger mounts that could chow down a few big meals a day, polo ponies had small stomachs and required as many as half a dozen separate feedings of grain, with hay put down in between to tide them over. The Greens and the Yellows would each require two dozen ponies in tournament condition, plus several younger ones still learning the ropes and a few retirees for training new players. The feeding and the exercising and the grooming and the mucking kept a lot of men employed.

A walled pit with a wooden horse in the center anchored that part of the grounds devoted to polo. Beyond it Dawn saw the flimsy breakaway goal posts, the boards set down to delineate the field of play. A few helmeted officers cantered about whirling mallets, unwinding at day’s end with an informal club chukker. Wanting no truck with officers, she found her way into the stable mews.

The only American army base she had visited before was a cavalry fort on the high plains, a relic of the Indian wars. There, an unescorted young woman appearing in the stables would have created a sensation, if not a riot. Here, it seemed to be an everyday occurrence to judge from the way the grooms reacted, or didn’t. She approached a private leading a pony back to its stable but hesitated to ask about Billy, suddenly afraid that he wouldn’t remember her. But before she could say a word, she heard a voice back in a nearby stable calling out, “Do my eyes deceive me or is that Dawn Rae, all growed-up?”

Billy Bach was all growed-up too. Probably six-three, and so much stronger in the shoulders and the jaw that she might not have recognized him. He stopped at attention three paces off and gave her a wondering look up and down. Perhaps her bootstrapping project had not altogether miscarried. She extended her right hand. He looked uneasily at his. “There’s nowhere that hand could’ve been that would trouble me, you of all men know that, Billy,” she said.

“Well, now that you put it that way,” he answered, and stepped forward to shake her hand with greater than normal vigor and persistency. It was good—no, it was a joy—to see a man who was young, who was strong, not starving, not ragged, not devoting all his waking hours to grievance. Like being back on a ranch. Papa’s voice in her head told her it was all founded on pitiless exploitation. But she needed a vacation from Papa’s voice.

Billy’s face shifted around. “Heard about your ma. I am more sorry than I can say. So young and all, so healthy.”

“Thank you, Billy. I got some time with her. It was sweet.”

“In Chicago.”

“Yes.”

“Dawn Rae, I don’t know how to say it, but—this ain’t Chicago.”

This tripped her up for a moment and then she laughed in a way that drew glances from grooms and whinnies from their equine spectators.

“Billy, either I had forgot about your wit, or the army issued you some when you signed up.”

“Army’s a little short on that,” he confided, “though there are some clever fellas in the Third Cav, I must say. Real aristocrats.”

“Didn’t know those two things went together.”

“Not always. Remember that poor little viscount in Wyoming? But you’d be surprised by some of ’em.”

Billy looked about, the first time he’d had eyes for anything but Dawn. Down the lane, an NCO was smoking a cigarette, looking at them curiously.

“I know I’m getting you in terrible trouble.”

“Not so terrible if you don’t mind my working while we chew the fat.”

She ended up standing outside the stable door, watching him at a demure remove as he inspected the pony’s feet. He bent down to sniff at one curiously, and she caught herself smiling. She gathered that these were the stables of the Yellows, currently the number-one team in the area, and as she could see, uncommonly well mounted. No army in the world would pay for ponies such as these; they must be the private property of rich officers.

“Some beauties in here,” she remarked.

“I’ll say,” he said, looking right at her.

She answered sharply, “I’m in town with my pa. You never met him.”

“Heard about him,” Billy said.

“All lies,” she joked.

“Bonus Army?”

“Yes.”

“Well . . . not all of those Reds served their country when they were called. But your pa did though, didn’t he?”

“Yes, and collected a Purple Heart for his troubles.”

“So I reckon he’s got as much of a right to his bonus as any other. I’m with the Bonus Marchers. Most of the men here are. As long as they keep the peace.”

“They are ever so particular about doing that.”

“Commander Waters? That the fella’s name?”

“Yes.”

“What sort of a man is he?”

“He’s a man in an unusual spot,” she said. “This thing kinda happened around him, in a freight yard in Oregon, and here he is trying to figure out what to do with twenty thousand hungry men on a mud flat.”

“I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.”

“Nor me.”

“Shame there’s no work for ’em.”

“That it is.” But this was verging on politics, which she was sick of, so she turned the conversation to Billy’s family, and what had led to his ending up here. It was not a long conversation—perhaps twenty minutes. Mess call approached. He walked her to a shuttle bus that would get her back to the streetcar, and they parted with a handshake a little more decorous than the first. He had her address now, for it was possible to receive mail at the Salvation Army tent, and she had his. He said nothing of what might occur next, but if he didn’t ask her out, she’d be shocked.

She was halfway back to Camp Marks before she realized that she had forgotten to collect any military intelligence.

 

In the middle of the night she was awakened by a bugle playing a ditty that she had heard before, in talkies and on the radio, but she knew not its coded army meaning.

“Assembly,” Papa said, the word catching in his gullet. He sat up on the cot that he had improvised to keep his ass out of the Anacostia mud, reached for the beat-up saucepan they used for a chamber pot, and hawked something into it. “They’re sounding Assembly.”

They were all sleeping in their clothes anyway. They pulled on shoes and began shuffling toward the platform, which was vaguely lit by kerosene lamps. But as many were running back the other way as toward it. One of these practically knocked Booker down, and she had to grab him by the arms to keep him from splattering into the mud. “The Reds are coming!” he said as explanation and apology.

Neither Booker nor any of the other Reds in their group had an answer ready for that.

“Gonna fetch my hickory,” the man continued, and ran into the dark. He was only one grain in an hourglass. In a dark, muddled process that would have been excruciating to anyone who actually was worried about oncoming Reds, most of Camp Marks assembled round the platform, armed with ax handles, canes, lengths of pipe, and bricks. Through it all Commander Waters stood above, first at attention, then gradually sagging to at-ease. From time to time he would check his watch or turn his head to receive a scrap of news from one of his khaki Praetorians. Sporadically one of these would boom down the steps and be engulfed by the more ardent men who’d pushed their way to the front. Deputizing a dozen or a score, he would lead them off toward some part of the camp’s perimeter thought to be vulnerable. Papa, Booker, and Silent Al—the Red triumvirate—took it all in without comment. Nothing was ever explained. Commander Waters never found the right moment to address the crowd but slowly faded to an anonymous form in the sepia glow of the kerosene. The bugler never sounded Recall. “Drill,” “False alarm,” and “Ran ’em off with their tails between their legs” were the most frequently circulated verdicts. Each member of the Bonus Army made his own decision when to stumble back to his cot.

In the light of the morning Papa was most pleased with Dawn’s work at Fort Myer. What she saw as a failure to attend to the matter at hand, he construed as shrewd cultivation of a source. He exhorted her both to follow up aggressively and to avoid seeming too forward. Dawn thought she hid her exasperation well, and took this as a cue to check the mail and visit Western Union. Passing the mess tent she noted a haggard Commander Waters in some sort of confab with his favorite men. No mail awaited her in the Salvation Army tent, but she got drawn into a shirt-sorting project, the objective of which was to pull out anything that was, or that could be made, khaki. After putting in a decent amount of effort she slipped out and took the streetcar across the bridge to the Western Union office she’d been using—by no means the most convenient to Camp Marks, but busy enough that, according to Papa, she might go unnoticed, and/or her connection to the BEF would not be scented. Tradecraft. She had her doubts. The staff already knew her and handed over a cablegram from Chicago before she identified herself.

appointment with toms son friday

She cabled back the address of the man in Chicago to whom Papa had entrusted the down payment, providing a false name, and then cabled that fellow to let him know to expect a visit from two gentlemen asking about Mr. So-and-So. Friday was three days out.

Then it was back to the Salvation Army tent, where the Sallies were conducting a scientific experiment to see if white shirts could be made khaki with tea, coffee, or some admixture thereof.

“It means ‘dirt’ in Urdu,” Papa said. “How difficult can it be?” But having delivered this morsel of intelligence, Dawn was already slipping into the tent to read a letter that had reached her from Billy in the afternoon post.

The next morning she wrote him back, accepting his invitation to go watch Scarface in Dupont Circle on Friday evening.

query shipment details reached her the next morning.

donations clothing required in bulk urgent was her answer. And then she was off to the Library of Congress to learn about Blackshirts and Brownshirts for Papa. Though their origins reached back to the close of the Great War, and as such were chronicled in books, their recent doings could only be gleaned from newspapers. So it was that she spent a few days scanning through back issues, looking for stories about the Sturmabteilung and the Stahlhelm, the Bund der Frontsoldaten and the Squadristi. Chicago, with all of its connections to Germany, had good coverage of doings in that country, and Italy was well reported on by London papers, maybe because journalists enjoyed being posted there. Even so, it was a needle-in-a-haystack project. Papa mightn’t have been best pleased had he known how much time she spent reading polo scores from England or lurid crime reportage from the Hog Butcher for the World. Stories of kidnappings, railway mishaps, and drownings became her entertainment as she waited for the temperature to drop on the Anacostia Flats, for cables to come in from Chicago, for her date with Billy Bach. She read all of the stories about the Lindbergh kidnapping and about the exploits of Amelia Earhart and the latest high-altitude balloon records, and of a curious couple in the Midwest named Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow; the latter was at large and thought to be planning an assault on a Texas prison farm where he’d once been incarcerated, the former had lately been let out of jail after a jury had declined to indict her for something. She thought Papa would be cheered up by the splendid image of a mass jailbreak from a prison farm, a battalion of shovel-swinging shock troops for the Revolution.

yes two dozen read a cable in her pocket as she sat in the cinema next to Billy Bach watching Scarface.

This was the most interesting film she had ever seen, for a few reasons.

The North Side/South Side division, Italians on the south, Irishmen on the north, was amusingly simplistic compared to Chicago’s actual turf map. But she had to admit it worked in the movie.

Scarface was in the habit of looking out his window at a big electric sign, shaped like a globe, emblazoned the world is yours. It put Dawn in mind of the fact that she had been all the way around the globe before her eighth birthday and it caused her to wonder whether she might ever again journey abroad. Or would she settle down in Montana or Chicago, or—it was not too soon to ask—marry Billy Bach and live out her days as an army wife?

To her surprise—and, she suspected, Billy’s—the movie depicted adult relationships between boys and girls in a way that she found uncomfortably direct. It was nothing she had not seen, or at least heard, in the kommunalka. But it was supposed to be different here. Bourgeois morality might be arbitrary superstition. But at least it was rules. If those were being waved off now, it raised the question of what would happen—how she and Billy would look at each other—when the movie ended and the lights came up.

But these concerns were minor compared to the movie’s central theme, which was the Thompson submachine gun. Not just as a piece of hardware but as the subject of some men’s obsession, and a catalyst and a symbol for abrupt shifts of power. “Hey, lookit!” Scarface exclaimed while lying on the floor of a restaurant being machine-gunned by furious Irishmen. “They got machine guns you can carry! If I had some of them I can run the whole works in a month!” The film showed a decent respect for the amount of time and manual dexterity needed to load magazines, good illumination and clean, level surfaces being of the essence. Dawn had forgotten the exact sequence of steps needed to ready the weapon for firing and was glad of the cinematic tutorial. All of the Communists would have to come here and watch this movie before two dozen of the weapons showed up at Potomac Yard concealed in bales of donated clothing.

Or so she thought through most of the movie. But at the very end, the tommy gun was overmastered by a weapon even more powerful: tear gas. Bursting fountains of it filling rooms, making the most potent gun seem toyish. Driven out of his apartment, Scarface died in the dark on a wet streetcar track under a crossfire of white lights, engulfed by cops who had not just tommy guns but Browning automatic rifles.

The lights came up and Dawn forced herself to look at Billy, expecting great awkwardness around the boy/girl material. But as they walked to the streetcar stop, it became clear that he had seen an altogether different movie. A movie about cars, and car chases, and running gun battles between cars that were chasing each other. “That’s the future,” he told her. “That’s what I’m gonna work on, Dawn. Except better.”

“What are you going to work on, Billy?”

“The Landesjäger.” Which meant nothing to her; but the one thing she took back to Camp Marks was the look on his face when he said the word, and the way he pronounced it: in the high German that his parents spoke at home.

 

Papa sighed at the number—he’d been hoping for more than two dozen tommy guns, apparently—but gave her the name and address of the man who was holding the rest of the money. The next morning, Saturday, she went to Western Union and penciled that out on a form, along with the stipulation assembled. For in the movie the guns had come out of their packing crates ready to fire, which was pretty much how Dad wanted it.

She set her pencil down and gazed out the window before sending the cable off to Chicago. It was very strange to have seen this world in a movie one night and be part of it for real the next day. “These fellas bootleg machine guns like they bootleg booze,” the cop in the movie had complained, and she’d been glad of the theater’s being dark, since her face had gone hot. She suspected that Papa had seen the movie and somehow convolved it with his plans.

Now her cousins were sticking their necks out in a Chicago infinitely more complex than the one in the movie. The cop had complained: “They had some excuse for glorifying our old Western bad men. They met in the middle of the street at high noon and waited for each other to draw. But these things sneak up, shoot a guy in the back, and then run away.”

see scarface, she added, then took the form up to the window.

The next morning, Private Bach came to Camp Marks to pick her up for a date. He did a fine job of making it mysterious, suggesting that she stand at the edge of the water at 0700 wearing “something nice.” She did so, then ended up waiting for half an hour, giving her time to parse that remark in all of its possible meanings. How nice, exactly, did it need to be? Was she going to be compared against other girls wearing things that, in their world, were nice? Did Billy mean to imply that being nicely attired was out of the ordinary for her?

He emerged from the mist on the creek in an olive-drab rowboat, turning around every so often to get his bearings. When he caught sight of her, he began to row harder, and soon ran the thing aground. She took her shoes off and squished out to meet him, covering a hundred feet of stuff that was neither land nor water. Then she trailed her feet over the side as he rowed, letting the water clean them off, if it was correct to say that anything in contact with Anacostia Creek could ever be clean.

This was not obvious from water level, where everything was foreshortened and commingled. But three channels, separated by two narrow points of land, came together before Camp Marks. From east to west, the three channels were Anacostia Creek, the Washington Channel, and the Potomac. The strips of land separating them were Buzzard Point and Potomac Park. Of these, the former supported Fort McNair, a small post, the site of the Army War College. Parts of it were all of a quarter of a mile from Camp Marks, and indeed Commander Waters might have chosen to site his primary bivouac on the Anacostia Flats precisely because it was within shouting, or at least bugling, distance of an army base. McNair had recreational facilities, including a little marina where soldiers could borrow rowboats and canoes. This explained the unusual and, Dawn had to admit, dashing style of Billy’s arrival.

He did not, however, row her back to Fort McNair but rather swung round Buzzard Point and up into the Washington Channel, a waterway about a thousand feet wide running between army territory on the east and a golf course on the west. Half an hour’s row up this took them to a little boat landing in Potomac Park, where Billy was able to berth the rowboat.

From there they walked to the polo grounds, where a tournament was under way. Private Bach, who was there in a supporting capacity, let her in through a side gate so that she could watch for free. Directly he was assigned tasks by shouting, red-faced men. There was no really appropriate place for an unescorted civilian to stand. Apparently Dawn’s hat, which she had plucked from the Salvation Army dress-up box, made her look sufficiently respectable that she was mistaken for a paying customer who’d lost her way. A colored enlisted man showed her to the grandstand and extended his hand and would not leave off until she had gone up there.

She might have looked decent to him, but to most there, she was so far out of her league as to suppress conversation wherever she went. Not so much, though, as to be worth the fuss of ejecting her.

Polo, seen from the spectators’ gallery, turned out to be exorbitantly social. Chukkers were separated by breaks long enough for the players to get fresh ponies and the fans to get refreshments. Her nose told her that Prohibition was being flouted, and the behavior of some confirmed it. Between matches were breaks long enough to get little sandwiches.

It was during one of these, as she was on her way into the ladies’, that she came face-to-face with Ida Colquhoun, who was coming out, freshly powdered.

Dawn hid behind the brim of her hat and dodged round. But when she emerged Mrs. Colquhoun was loitering outside the toilet. “Ida,” she announced, as if this would be news, and strode to the attack, extending her gloved hand. “You’re the girl from Camp Marks.”

“Dawn Glendive,” she said, using the name of a town in Montana.

“I might not have recognized you, Dawn, save for that lovely hat. I spotted it in the tent the other day and I was saying to one of the Sallies what a shame its charms were to be wasted on the population of Camp Marks. I’m so pleased you had the good taste to pluck it out and make it yours—it does complement your eyes very nicely.”

Dawn was armed against anything save pleasantness. She mumbled something. Ida took that as license to link elbows with her and begin powering back to her place in the grandstand. “I do hope you’ll sit the next chukker at least with me; I should so like to hear your ideas on the present situation at the camp . . . oh my, the Sixteenth Artillery has some spirited mounts, don’t they?”

Being on Ida’s arm explained Dawn’s being here: another daft charity project. Mrs. Colquhoun seemed to swing a big enough stick that the sorts who had been throwing bum looks at Dawn were suddenly trying to converse with her. The Bonus Army would have been a difficult topic. Dawn worked the conversation round to western polo ranches—never mind what she did, or how she got, there. This gave them all they really wanted, which was a way to break the ice and talk of polo. She was able to sit back and let the men take over and talk of the very ranches where she and Billy had worked, and the ponies they knew from there.

Once the men had wrenched the conversational steering wheel, as it were, from the women and jammed the gas pedal down, Dawn felt a light touch on her arm from Ida. “Do you play, Dawn?”

“Oh, no, I—”

“I mean, quite obviously there is no facility at Camp Marks. But your duties at the ranch, as you’ve described them, included some riding. Some use of the mallet.”

“Yes.”

“You might be interested to know that there are women’s teams.”

“I’d heard, but—”

“Barely. It can be difficult to field two entire sides. More often than not they fill out their numbers with men who, I’m afraid, don’t take the women’s game very seriously.”

Dawn couldn’t help glancing at the heavy, self-assured men who had assumed responsibility for their conversation.

“Yes,” Ida said, “you see the problem.”

Dawn looked at Ida, who gave her a lovely smile and said, “Could you play tomorrow?”

 

Blue jeans and work boots sufficed. Her job was to fill out a scratch team that existed to give Ida’s neighbor’s daughter’s side something to practice on. They played in some other girl’s “backyard” that easily accommodated a regulation 300-by-200-yard grounds. Her teammates were a sixty-year-old uncle suffering from Parkinson’s but cheerful and game; a teenage boy who had just begun learning the game three weeks prior and who was too paralyzed by the sight of girls’ bottoms in riding breeches to be of much use; and Katherine, a well-bred young woman loaned to them from the other team, which was called the Lady Blues. The point was to give the Lady Blues some time playing together. Katherine was the least proficient, and, like most novices, bewildered.

The Lady Blues, to their credit, immediately scored six consecutive goals. Dawn gave up on ever making anything of her own side and tried to understand what the Lady Blues were after. She appointed herself to the position of back and began riding off their number one, who was aggressive and a dab hand with the mallet but lacked agility. Dawn’s mount was a little hard-mouthed but a great runner, and so she was able to make a few good runs up on offense. The Lady Blues won 8–0.

Dawn had already resolved to walk straight to the horseshoe driveway after the match and climb back into the chauffeured car that had brought her. Not that she hated these people. But almost nothing was more pathetic than a girl in her station waiting to be noticed by the likes of the Lady Blues. The car, however, was driverless. Ida ran her down, fetched her back, and made her sit in a gazebo with all of the other players, being served lemonade and cucumber sandwiches by colored servants.

She sat next to their number two—the best player—who had scored seven of the goals. This was Adele, Ida’s neighbor. Through mysterious preverbal signals in posture and glance, Adele and Dawn had determined that they liked each other, a state of affairs that would endure whether or not they ever had an actual conversation. Adele confirmed as much, and Dawn reciprocated, through microscopic shifts in posture and silent pacts as to what they would and wouldn’t attend to. Across the table was Patricia, the number one, looking blown and battered since Dawn, who outweighed her by thirty pounds, had spent the last two chukkers riding her off. “My breeches!” she exclaimed, and made Dawn see several small holes in the fabric.

“Those hooks on your boots,” Adele explained, glancing down. Dawn noticed that strands of beige stuff were dangling from the lacing hooks.

“We shall have to get Dawn proper riding boots for next time,” Ida said.

This was the first Dawn had heard of the possibility of a next time. No one else seemed surprised.

Patricia—who lived here—still seemed a bit put out.

Since no one else was going to say it—and since she’d already been invited back—Dawn said, “Sorry if I hustled you too much. But listen. Your pony is beautiful. I know why you’re in love with him. But he’s too big for a number one. You’re petite. Your game needs to be agile. If you can’t slip the back, you’re a liability to your side. If you were a man, you’d have been told this. I’m telling you.”

 

Back at camp, Papa wanted to know all. Fatherly pride, anthropological fascination, and political outrage were hustling one another inside his head, producing results she found tiresome. Small children were starving to death within a hundred yards of this campfire. Rich women were looking to her to get their polo team sorted. And she was embroiled in a plot to ship two dozen submachine guns to the nation’s capital, where they would somehow topple the government. She would do anything for Papa but accept responsibility for how he was feeling.

“I am going back on Wednesday afternoon,” she said. “They are practicing for an exhibition game Saturday, and they have a long ways to go.”

“Well, it’d be a terrible shame if they made a poor showing,” Papa said.

She did not care for his petulance. She knew how this looked: that she was a shallow girl, distracted, insufficiently attentive to the requirements of the global workers’ proletarian revolution. But there was no getting around the fact that the interactions she was having with Billy Bach and with the Lady Blues were incalculably more fascinating to her than anything happening at Camp Marks. The exception that proved the rule was Silent Al, who had his eye upon her as always, and seemed to have some awareness of what she was thinking. She had not the faintest idea of whether Al would make a move on her anytime soon, but she had to admit that it would have been simpler, and less likely to end in disaster, than trying to be Billy Bach’s girl, or Adele’s friend.

“You wanted me to get noticed by Mrs. Colquhoun. I did. This happened. If you want, I can give her a copy of Das Kapital and a stern talking-to.”

This produced a wounded look from Papa, but it also ended the conversation, which was all she wanted.

Most of her communications with Billy Bach were through letters. More and more, his concerned machinery. The movie’s car chases had rekindled his interest in engines and wheels, its startlingly direct scenes in bedrooms spooked him. Machines it was, then. Armored cars and tanks were the future of the cavalry. Learning to change their oil and repair bent axles was the new stable-mucking and hoof-picking. He had been accepted for a training program. Promotions awaited. Which might be a backhanded way of telling her that he was going to be collecting a steady paycheck for a long time. If so, she ought to be flattered. But she was numb to it. Complications, obliquely mentioned in cablegrams, were delaying the tommy guns. Her riding muscles, unused for a year, hurt so much she could barely squat over a latrine. Ida wanted her shoe size, her inseam. She went to the library, the only place she could hear herself think. Bonnie and Clyde had gone to ground. Hogging the crime headlines was Pretty Boy Floyd, who had massacred a bunch of cops in Kansas City. The Brown- and the Blackshirts had a British admirer in one Oswald Mosley, who was organizing Fascists there. Some other Brit named Chadwick had discovered a thing called a neutron. Schleswig-Holstein looked to go Nazi in the coming election. Harvests were going to fail in Russia. Japanese were being vaguely frightful in the new country they had made called Manchukuo.

Dawn played an afternoon chukker with the Lady Blues. Her thighs were still killing her. Ida had not been able to round up proper boots in her size but had found some black men’s boots that would do. Blacking rubbed off on opposing players’ breeches and was not comme il faut. Patricia wore her torn pair, so it didn’t matter.

Dawn had assumed that this would be her last contact with the Lady Blues, but it turned out that their exhibition was to be played at Fort Myer, preparatory to a ball that the Third Cavalry was throwing to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the charge up San Juan Hill. Billy had already invited her to the ball. Ida now asked her to show up earlier in the day to support the Lady Blues. So over the next two days Dawn divided her energies between gun-running and trying to turn something she’d jerked out of the Salvation Army bin into a ball gown. The Sallies were of inestimable help. At Camp Marks there was no one with whom she could discuss polo, and only a few were privy to the illegal submachine gun project, but the Sallies had no trouble at all engaging with a ball gown, especially given the character of the party: both patriotic and glamorous. Efforts were made to impart a Cuban flair. It all went quite over Dawn’s head.

At daybreak on Saturday, she stood on the street that ran past the front of the Salvation Army tent, dressed in jeans and boots, waiting for Ida’s chauffeur. The ball gown and accoutrements were packed in a big old suitcase. Keeping an eye on her from their posts flanking the tent’s entrance were two stalwart members of the Khaki Shirts: a new organization whose existence had been made public, and explained to fascinated newspapermen, by Commander Waters the day before. Following the examples of the great leaders of Europe, he was taking advantage of the unique situation into which fate had precipitated him to form a corps that would put the wasted energies of unemployed men to work in nation-building activities. Dawn hid her amusement at the way these two clicked their heels and saluted as the black car glided up to collect her. One of them stepped out to help heave the suitcase into the trunk.

Conveying twenty-four ponies from their stables around Northern Virginia to Fort Myer was a considerable project, handled by the men whom the girls’ daddies kept on payroll to groom their horses and drive their vehicles. Moreover, their gracious hosts at Fort Myer had made a number of men available to the Lady Blues, and Billy had volunteered to be one of them. Nonetheless, Dawn had as much work as she wished to shoulder, managing all of the crises that emerged when ten high-strung parents, pre-coiffed for the ball, tried to get five rich girls in the saddle on unfamiliar turf while hobnobbing with whatever high-ranking brass decided to wander by and say hello. Attention was lavished upon Blanche, the number three, who had come down with female problems, described in powder-room bulletins at least as cryptic as the cables Dawn had been receiving from Chicago, and hardly less ominous than the news from Schleswig-Holstein. Number three was generally the role of the least experienced player, so they replaced the poor girl with Katherine, their understudy. Dressed as a sort of ranch hand in her desperate old jeans and a khaki shirt stolen from the Khaki Shirts, Dawn found herself in the saddle, showing Katherine a few basic moves. There was also work to be done exercising the ponies, getting them used to the new sights and scents of these grounds. As this went on she found herself under the gaze of curious cavalrymen beginning to take seats in the grandstand. Billy’s eye was ever on her. That plus the natural movements of riding made it a warm morning.

The opposing side filtered onto the grounds. Fort Myer could have fielded a terrific squad and made up for it with a colossal handicap, but the game still would have been one-sided and dull. Instead they had put together a decent enough, but not crushingly formidable, team: Nunn, a colonel with a white mustache. Gatacre, a British officer, stationed here as some sort of liaison. Asquith, a lieutenant, extraordinarily well mounted. And Mrs. Pierce, the wife of a Third Cavalry officer, apparently quite the supporter of ladies’ polo and a friend of the Lady Blues.

Gradually the elements of the match formed up on the grounds, and supernumerary horses and grooms retreated to the stables. Dawn found a good place to stand and watch near one corner of the stands. Remarks were made to the effect that the match was all in good fun and not to be taken awfully seriously, except for the part about fostering fresh players. The expressions on the Lady Blues’ faces did not show anything like that gaiety. “Darn it!” called Lieutenant Asquith, the young man on the pretty horse. “I’d been hoping to boost my handicap!” Asquith had been quite busy during warm-ups tittupping up to members of the Lady Blues to give advice for which they had not asked. He was especially keen to show them how to hold their mallets, which called for a lot of hand-holding and arm-stroking. When not making himself thus useful he would ride over to his friends, who were sitting together, and say things to them that produced eruptions of salty laughter. They applauded and shouted whenever Asquith thought up a reason to go galloping past. Yet for all of that, Dawn did not think him a very good rider. Something was not right about his position in the saddle. His hand was stiff and heavy and likely to spoil the beautiful horse’s mouth very soon if no one talked to him about it. He was not cruel in a way that would have drawn the notice of this horse-loving crowd, but insensitive in a way that, in the long run, might be more callous than beating it. She could only assume that he had brought servants with him, expert grooms who toiled to undo the damage he inflicted upon the animal’s training with every moment he spent in the saddle. She thought it remarkable that his friends were oblivious to this. What cavalry could employ such officers? But then she saw it: they were the new breed, the ones who would be driving around in cars and tanks maintained by Billy. Everything in this horse world would become as anachronistic as powdered wigs, and it wouldn’t matter that they did it badly.

The match was decorous enough, with outbreaks of fine play on both sides. The personalities and styles of the players began to impress themselves on the crowd and to become topics of remark, and later of emotional response. Patricia had swapped her prize mount for a pony that was nondescript but nimble. She soon made a habit of slipping Colonel Nunn’s halfhearted attempts to ride her off. She didn’t score—Adele did—but she did handle some balls sent her way by Adele and by the Lady Blues’ back, a husky, determined college student named Irene. Irene, though, largely had her hands full guarding Lieutenant Asquith, the number two. He didn’t do a lot of scoring—clearly he was under orders to hold back—but did accomplish a huge amount of dashing about. It was unclear to Dawn whether Asquith intended this as comic relief. For clues, she watched Gatacre, the British officer. He watched Asquith with an unreadable expression, but Dawn suspected that he loathed the man. Gatacre’s preordained fate in the game, as number one, was to be hustled and ridden off by Irene, which he accepted with grace. It looked as if he were giving her pointers during lulls, zooming his hands about and talking animatedly while Irene watched and asked good questions.

From the way Ida and Mrs. Pierce were looking at each other, it all seemed to be coming off as they’d hoped until the final seconds of the fifth chukker. Katherine was riding after the ball. Irene was three lengths behind and in a position to receive a backhander, which she could then send up the field to Patricia, who had broken free of the exhausted Colonel Nunn. Still lacking in confidence, Katherine kept looking back over her shoulder at Irene, trying to work out the shot. But all of a sudden Asquith was there, dangerously close to committing a foul, a combination of riding too aggressively and failing to control his exasperated horse. It went all wrong; Katherine’s mount stopped hard and her mallet swung short of the ball. Irene kept on coming, perhaps thinking to collect the ball on her way past. The umpire blew his whistle, whether to call a foul on Asquith or signal the end of the chukker wasn’t clear. Katherine did not hear it. She tried the backhander a second time and again missed. Her mallet swung up behind her and caught Irene in the face. An audible crunch and a ghastly uproar in the stands. Irene, both hands clapped over her face, gamely steered for the clubhouse with her knees. Dawn, who’d seen worse, was as interested in the crowd’s reaction as in the medical/dental consequences. She’d had her eye on a block of more senior Third Cav officers, majors and colonels. She suspected they had only come here under duress. They had looked bored in the early going. Now they’d become as excited about the game and its personalities as anyone else, and seemed quite let down about poor Irene, who had become a crowd favorite.

The verdict was that Irene might lose one or more teeth and needed to see a dentist straightaway. Katherine was almost in a worse state than Irene, and took much calming down. The interval before the last chukker was padded out to allow the Lady Blues time to regroup. A major from the Third Cavalry presented himself and asked, in the courtliest way, if he might be of assistance.

Dawn found herself in a broom closet with Ida and Mrs. Pierce.

“We can fill Irene’s place with a volunteer from the crowd,” Ida said, “and shall do so if needed. But—” And here, by a look, she seemed to pass the ball, as it were, to Mrs. Pierce.

“Mrs. Colquhoun says you are qualified to play,” said Mrs. Pierce in an impressive Southern accent. “The matter of attire may be overlooked. I should much rather see the match played out by an all-girl side than accept a chivalrous gesture. Would you be willing?”

Dawn was willing. She took Irene’s place at back. The crowd, which had started bored, then had become interested, then had moaned at the drama around Irene, was now enlivened by the appearance of the mystery girl in blue jeans. Dawn was on a bigger mount, a fifteen-hander, but well trained. She could tell she bestrode a lot of money. The only fly in the ointment was a certain skittishness; clearly this animal had grown up on a farm in horse country and never seen more than a bridge table’s worth of humans together in one place. But he was fundamentally level-headed and Dawn thought he could be managed.

A chukker lasted seven minutes. She felt like making the most of it. A strong sense had overtaken her in recent days of bad things about to happen. For all she knew, she might end up in prison. The freedom and power she felt on this beautiful horse was not a thing to waste.

The opposing side treaded gingerly at first; they felt bad about Irene and knew nothing of Dawn. She was able to intercept a slow-rolling pass from Asquith toward Gatacre and turn upfield at a gallop, just shy of the sideline, shepherding the ball with dribbling strokes as she looked for Adele or Patricia. The latter was screened by Colonel Nunn, looking alive on a fresh pony. On a smaller mount Dawn might have been tempted to turn in and ride for the goal, but she was cautious of trying it on an unfamiliar horse. In any case Adele broke clear of Mrs. Pierce right in the center. Dawn turned in slightly and made the obvious pass, perhaps a bit too hard; but Adele, out in the open, was able to control it and knock it into the goal.

This elicited a cheer from the crowd. That group of senior officers happened to be just abreast of Dawn. Their cheer startled the big horse and caused it to rear. Dawn, who’d been pulling the reins for a reversal of direction, felt this coming and was able to maintain her seat with no great difficulty. Having taken note of her desire to turn around, the horse remained up on his hind legs for rather a long time, sort of tottering around to face the other way. While she was waiting for the front hooves to come down on terra firma, Dawn glanced over curiously and happened to catch the eye of the courteous major who had offered to ride in her place. The man snapped out a salute. Given that her hands were occupied, Dawn was forced to respond with a mere wink. At the other end of the field, Asquith’s supporters were jeering him good-naturedly, telling him to put a bit more mustard on his next pass.

Dawn actually wanted no part of Lieutenant Asquith, but it so happened that a minute or so later she was riding after him when he swung and missed at the ball—perhaps trying to put too much mustard on it. Dawn rode in to collect it. As he was turning about he crossed her path and was whistled for a foul. His friends were merciless. Patricia took a free shot at the goal and missed by inches, so no harm was done save to Asquith’s pride. He got some of it back a minute later by taking advantage of a stupid mistake on Dawn’s part to score a goal. He then presented himself before his cheering section for congratulations, which they gave grudgingly, and mixed with insults that might have got them ejected from some places. The game had somehow become all about him. He was one of those men who cannot rest until he is the center of all notice, even if it is hostile.

A minute later Katherine flinched away from some aggressive riding by Asquith and left the ball sitting out in the open. Dawn galloped toward it, believing that Asquith couldn’t possibly get his mount turned around in time to make a decent hit on the ball. And she was right. Hearing her approach, not wishing to let her have the satisfaction of coming away with the ball, he leaned back in his saddle and reached behind him awkwardly. Dawn came scything in off of Asquith’s right fore, on course to cut behind. The ball was within her compass. But at the last moment she flicked the head of her mallet up and hooked it with Asquith’s. Then she gripped the handle as hard as she could, readying herself for the shock, and leaned away from him. Otherwise the mallet would have been ripped from her grasp. Asquith lost his grip but the wrist loop caught on his hand and torqued his arm back and around behind him and pulled him clean out of the saddle. Dawn heard the thump of his body hitting the ground a moment before the astonished roar of the crowd. Though they quieted down a good deal when he did not get up and it became clear that he had suffered a dislocated shoulder. After that, Asquith received all the attention he could ever have dreamed of.

The match was then called on the grounds of there having been quite enough carnage already. Refreshments were set out while those girls who had other clothes changed into them. Dawn had nothing in reserve, save for the ball gown, and it was too early for that. So she was at loose ends. News about Asquith filtered into the clubhouse. Irene had been evacuated. Blanche was in a state of repose, wishing she could have seen it. Katherine and Patricia had no idea what to say to Dawn. But Adele marched right up and threw her arms around Dawn’s neck and gave her a fat kiss on the cheek. Ida Colquhoun stood near the entrance, gripping her bag in both hands, lips pursed as if sucking wet cement through an invisible soda straw, watching Dawn as if wondering what hell spawn she had inadvertently debuted to local society. Mrs. Pierce, a bit surprisingly, seemed fascinated but kept her distance.

As Dawn had nothing to occupy the time while the others changed, she slipped out the side door of the clubhouse, went around back of the stable, and flew off on a long crying jag, her first really good one since her mother had died. A few people could see her from down the lane and so she faced the wall and let ’er rip.

Then a monogrammed handkerchief was in her sight line. She straightened and snatched it out of a gloved hand. She pressed the cool linen over her face and kept it there until she had herself under control.

“They always say to blow your nose. I don’t find it helpful.”

“You do a lot of crying?”

“All the time.”

She took the hanky down, exposing what she was sure must be a wild red pair of eyes. As she’d guessed, it was the polite major.

“Thank you,” Dawn said.

“Oh, no, thank you, young lady.”

“For what?”

“Saving my career.”

“What?!”

“I was about to go down there and assault that man Asquith.”

“Oh, that? It was . . .” How would Ida say it? “It was my very great pleasure.”

He grinned fiercely and terribly. “I came here to make you aware, if you did not already know it, that you are a magnificent woman. Surrounded, I’m pretty sure, by men incapable of admitting that fact.”

“My pa knows.” She was only joking.

“Every father thinks that. You need to hear it from someone else. If there is any way that I can help you, or repay my debt to you, only name it. My name is George Patton.”

“Well, I’ll have to mull that over, Major Patton. I am Dawn, by the way.”

“To make a man wait is a lady’s prerogative. In the meantime, I hope that you will be my guest for the remainder of the day. After the luncheon there will be a tour of our new facilities, and a demonstration. In the evening, a ball.”

“Thank you, I already plan to be at the ball.”

“And what young Apollo is worthy to have Diana on his arm?”

“Billy Bach.”

He was disconcerted. “Private Bach! Really! Well, he seems a very decent young man. You, however, are far out of his league. And if you settle for the likes of him, the day will come when you wish you had held yourself up a little more. I do not know and it is not my business to ask what brought you to this pass, weeping behind the stables in blue jeans. But in some past life you were a princess and you would do well to keep it in mind when selecting male companions. The handkerchief is yours.” He saluted, shook her hand, and strode away.

 

Billy had evaporated. Dawn had nothing to do with her afternoon. She accepted Patton’s invitation and was thus incorporated into a group numbering perhaps one score, of whom the others seemed like rather grand Washington people. She drew one sort of attention from the women and a different sort from their men. The upshot was that none of them spoke to her, which struck her as altogether sensible.

First they sat in the grandstand and watched riders doing gymnastic tricks on horseback, a thing she had heard of but never seen. It was an easy practice to make fun of, but she could see in it a survival of tricks that knights of old must have used in mounted warfare.

They were then driven round the post for a while, seeing the sights. They ended up in a part of Fort Myer that she had not visited before: a row of outbuildings tucked behind an armory. They had a somewhat disused and out-of-the-way character, though work had been done to replace rotten wood with new blond lumber and to freshen up the paint. Patton, who until this point had ridden along in the backseat of an open car but done nothing except peruse documents handed him by an aide, now climbed down and invited the guests to remain comfortably seated or get out and stretch their legs as the mood took them. Dawn was one of the few women who elected to get out, and found Patton at the ready, gloved hand extended to help her down off the running board.

“I know I can trust all here to be discreet,” Patton began, strolling toward a low building that looked to have been a stable. “The press would mangle this. Anyone who knows me knows that my love of horses is second to no man’s.” As he laid stress on this word he favored Dawn with a wink. “So I don’t want you to take what you are about to see as a repudiation of the traditions of the horse cavalry. But it is a fact, ladies and gentlemen, that in the next war, men will ride to the sound of the guns on wheels.” He stopped before the first stable door and let the guests form up in front of him. “We do not intend to be behindhand when that terrible day comes. Now, you might ask how such advances can be made to mesh with our way of doing things at Fort Myer—a small post embedded in a great city. Well, it’s true that this is no place for a tank division. But what many civilians may not know is that armed vehicles are well suited for urban warfare also.” He paused for effect, then grinned. “Urban warfare, I hear you saying, whatever can you be thinking, Major Patton? Why, this is the United States of America! Well, you might be interested to know that less than five miles, as the crow flies, from this spot, is an army of twenty thousand, many of them battle-hardened combat veterans, bivouacked in an armed camp, organized on military lines, within striking distance of the Capitol and of the White House. This organization has been infiltrated by Communist revolutionaries taking their orders direct from the Comintern in Moscow. It is a very alarming situation, as I’m sure you will agree. What is the Third Cavalry doing about it, you might ask? Well, first of all, we have been in close touch with our counterparts in Germany, who found a similar peril in many of their cities following the war. And after some trial and error they hit on some weapons and tactics that would hit those Commies hard, and knock them down so they wouldn’t get up again. And they installed those doctrines and supplied those weapons to a new corps which they call the Landesjäger—the National Hunters or the Hunters of the Nation, take your pick, German is notorious for mashing words together, they make words like they make wurst. Those Landesjäger boys were kind enough to tell us how it’s done. And so when President Hoover called General MacArthur into the Oval Office and expressed his concerns about the Bolshevik threat, we knew just what was needed. Boys, show our guests the American Landesjäger.”

Men who’d been waiting within now rolled the doors aside, and electric lights were switched on to reveal a row of vehicles, polished and shining. Engines roared to life up and down the line, and the machines rumbled out onto the expanse of pea gravel that had been freshly laid down in front. At least a hundred men had been lurking back there, and they came out in echelons: the drivers first, mounted cavalry with tommy guns and Browning automatic rifles and shotguns lined up on the running boards, gunners and tankers at the controls of the big weapons, dismounted cavalry marching in columns behind the vehicles, and in the back, standing at attention in the open maws of the stables, the mechanics. Dawn, who’d been wondering where Billy had run off to, could hardly bring herself to look. But at six foot three he was hard to miss. He wasn’t more than twelve feet away from her, facing straight ahead but swiveling his eyes to take in the startling apparition of Dawn, the Communist’s daughter, standing near Major Patton. “He cuts a fine figure, I’ll give him that,” Patton said, just for her.

 

“This is what I was sorta trying to tell you,” Billy said into her ear a few hours later, during the first dance.

“Well,” Dawn said, “I guess there are some things you just have to see to believe.”

“They’re real serious about it.”

“I can see that.”

“Major Patton says that just popping off a few rounds, scaring them away, isn’t how to do it. They don’t stay scared long. And when the smoke clears, well, now they’ve got a couple of martyrs. He says you gotta make a statement—inflict mass casualties.”

She was pretty sure they were the only couple on the ballroom floor talking about mass casualties.

She had, of course, never attended a ball before. In spite of the Sallies’ best efforts, her gown was rudimentary, and jewelry nonexistent, other than the Smolny Institute locket, which was the only piece she owned. Her hair and face were frankly those of a woman who had spent the day riding about on horses. She felt as though a lot of people were looking at her. Not because of how she looked but because of what had happened earlier.

“Hooking Leftenant Asquith’s stick and unhorsing him was rough, verging on foul play, and contrary to the spirit of the rules and the traditions of the sport,” said Gatacre, dancing with her later. “I wish I had been able to do it—and to get away with it!”

Later Colonel Nunn danced with her as well, though he didn’t say much, and Mrs. Pierce came over to exchange pleasantries. Those gestures, and Major Patton’s attentions, seemed to smooth things over. The sergeant at arms kept announcing new arrivals, each couple more exalted than the last. Gradually Dawn was forgotten among senators, ambassadors, generals, and heiresses. General MacArthur, the army chief of staff, was there with his aide, Eisenhower, and both of their wives. Turning around in a series of slow dances with Billy and some of the other privates, Dawn watched them all: MacArthur aloof, Patton and Eisenhower quite comfortable with each other, talking, she suspected, of tanks.

“You and I are warriors.” This was Patton, talking to her ear during a dance. “This is why we recognize each other, as if we had fought side by side in some battle of old. People don’t know what to do with us. They depend upon us in times of war. Between wars, we must each find our own place, or take the honorable way out.”

The pattern of the dance dictated that they draw apart for a few steps. Dawn kept her eyes on Patton’s. She’d known men like him before. He would keep on talking this way, taking silence for agreement. And she was silent. Not because she agreed but because his discourse was so peculiar she did not know how to address it.

“It’s hard enough for me as a man, in the peacetime army,” Patton went on when they came back together. “I have no idea what advice to give you as a woman. I fear we have no place for you in this civilization, and I mean that as a criticism of the civilization.”

The man was barely sane. But none of this was any more surreal than the ball, the other things that had been happening. He spoke forthrightly, which she liked. And though he was a bit of a nut, his theories explained certain things about Dawn and her place in the world more satisfactorily than Papa’s. Too bad he was planning to massacre Dawn and her friends.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, “I know of a place where I might fit in.”

“Well, that must be one hell of a place.”

Patton escorted her back to where he’d fetched her from. It was a long walk, all eyes upon them. More because of Patton’s notoriety than hers; she knew she was well on her way to oblivion, and she couldn’t wait to get there.

“You’re worried, aren’t you,” she said to Billy during the last dance, “that I’m going to get arrested, or get my picture in the paper, and Patton’s going to find out about it, and you’ll be in trouble. Well, rest your mind. He owes me a favor.”

“I’m more worried that you’re going to get killed,” Billy said.

 

She took a midnight taxi back to Camp Marks. If the Comintern raised its eyebrows, she would let them know about all the intelligence this small expenditure had bought. She had been dreading, in a schoolgirlish way, the moment of exposure when she would climb out in her ball gown beneath the stare of the Khaki Shirts guarding the entrance. But they seemed to have deserted their post. The taxi left her holding her suitcase before a dark and abandoned Salvation Army tent. Beyond it, though, the camp was alive with shouting, and bright lights were catching in the humid air above the flats. She walked through the tent, smelling the musty old books in the lending library and the perfume and mothballs on the donated clothes. Some kind of rhythmic shouting was going on down near the speakers’ stand, men counting in unison: “eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen . . . fourteen . . . FIFTEEN!”

She parted the flaps and saw the stand lit by the headlamps of cars and trucks pulled up around it. Standing atop was Commander Waters, dressed in the jodhpurs and black jackboots he’d begun wearing since the founding of the Khaki Shirts. Around him were his chief deputies. Their chins were tucked as they watched something directly below, something Dawn could not see because her view was blocked by the crowd. Roaring men counted to fifteen again, and then raised a cheer. Waters had a swagger stick tucked under his arm; he used it to point at something below, and after a few moments the counting began again. Some sort of dance or game? Men bellowed as if drunk, but no liquor was allowed in the camp. She reached the periphery of the crowd but no one really seemed to know what was happening save that it had something to do with Reds. Pushing her way closer she began to see red, all right, and glimpses of things that were horrible but difficult to make sense of.

Then finally she got a clear look and saw it all at once: six men, stripped from the waist up, wrists lashed together above their heads and tethered to the stanchions of the railing that surrounded the speakers’ platform. Some of the men were black and some were white. Blood sheeted down their backs from parallel cuts and soaked the bottoms of their trousers. One of them was being lashed by a big fellow who had peeled off his own shirt to keep blood spatters off the khaki. “Six . . . seven . . . eight . . .” hollered the crowd. She saw men grinning in the light of the headlamps.

The man being whipped was Papa. She recognized the others too: Silent Al, Booker, all the men she’d been living with.

Papa was writhing and dancing below his rope like a gaffed fish. Not because of the lash-work, she knew, but because he was having difficulty breathing. She pushed toward him. “Ten . . . eleven . . . twelve . . .”

She had been thinking, during the drive home, about the moment in the polo match when some impulse had caused her to twitch her mallet up away from the ball and instead hook Asquith and unhorse him. Why had she done that? Patton had a theory. An interesting theory, flattering to her in a way. All well and good on a polo ground. But what would happen now, if she reached the big man with the whip on the count of thirteen or fourteen?

She never found out, since some man, jumping about in a kind of ecstatic dance, accidentally stepped on the hem of her gown. She toppled over sideways, heard the fabric tear, felt her knee squish into the mud. Half the skirt came away as she staggered to her feet. One shoe had gone missing. She kicked off the other and ran to Papa. Waters made a sweeping gesture with his stick and the men around him stepped up to the railing and knelt to cut the ropes with pocketknives. Papa’s rope jerked free and he toppled back into Dawn’s arms, his bloody back slamming into her front. He knocked her back and landed atop her in the mud, chest working convulsively. Dawn looked up into the light to see spittle raining down on them.

 

“They have a man there, Patton, and never mind about the others. Patton is a killer, and he spends long days thinking about how to mow us down. He has a gun on a truck that fires shotgun shells the size of my arm. Armored cars with machine-gun barrels pointing every which way—thirty caliber for people, fifty for buildings and vehicles.” Dawn did not mention the fact that Patton was enamored of her, since it did not really go to the point and would be poorly received by this audience: the central committee of WESL, the Workers’ Ex-Servicemen’s League, meeting in plenary session in the basement of a derelict steam plant a few blocks from the White House. “If you go up against him and the weapons that he has, you will all be killed.”

“We know of Patton,” Papa said. He could only talk in a low voice, but this only lent his words gravity and forced all others to attend closely. “Why, he wouldn’t even be alive now if it weren’t for Joe Angelo, who rescued him out of a shell crater after he got himself shot in the ass. Joe Angelo, who’s now starving at Camp Marks.” The last sentence, though, was drowned out by laughter at the idea of Major Patton shot in the ass. Dawn had to hand it to Papa, he had a knack for the propagandistic wisecrack. Few of the men here had heard of Patton. None had met him. Dawn’s effort to scare them had been nipped in the bud by Papa’s ass joke; from now on, when Patton’s name was mentioned, they would think of that, not his arsenal of 75-millimeter shotgun shells.

Papa must have read this in her face, for when the room quieted, he went on: “I don’t argue that he is a killer. But the bourgeoisie do not have a monopoly on such. Think of the heroes of the Great October Socialist Revolution.”

“They aren’t here.”

“They are here; their moment has not yet come round.”

“They had a moment on Saturday night.”

This was Tuesday. They had spent Sunday and Monday becoming human again following a helter-skelter exodus from Anacostia: six half-naked, bleeding men, a few of their sympathizers, and Dawn, barefoot in the bloody and ragged aftermath of her gown. They’d not been able to take any of their things with them. Papa had lost his jacket with the money sewn into the lining. Dawn had lost her suitcase with her jeans and her riding boots. She was now wearing men’s clothing.

She had to admit, though, that the picture looked different now that they lay in the bosom of WESL. Thousands of Communists were in town. Almost all of them had chosen to respect Camp Marks’s no-Reds policy and had instead taken residence in WESL squats closer to the middle of things. Papa’s little cell at Camp Marks had been a lonely outpost staffed by fanatics. To Dawn it had seemed more desperate with each passing day. Why procure two dozen tommy guns for six people? But now they had been re-embraced by a small army of honest-to-God Bolshevik revolutionaries. From here the story Papa had been telling himself made more sense. She could see how men who had been living in this Red island for a few weeks, who hadn’t been to Fort Myer and seen the Landesjäger, would take a sunny view of their prospects. Communists were here from Detroit, St. Louis, Seattle, San Francisco—so many of them, and such strong and vivid personalities, that her head was in a muddle just trying to sort them out. One of them, a big blond Italian from Hartford, definitely not keen on a young woman’s having any role in these deliberations, broke in: “Were you thinking we had come here unaware that the forces of capital had killers in their employ, and that we would be facing them? Do you take us for children?”

 

Later, talking in private to Papa as they took the evening air on the roof, she tried to make him understand things: not only the danger they faced but her own frustration at being spoken to this way. Thinking back to Grisha on the truck, she said, “Nor am I a child. I have seen things these men know not of.”

“And they have seen things that would be novel to you.” They were speaking Russian. The day had been cool and gray, with a couple of rain showers that had left puddles on the flat roof of the building. The early evening sun was now cutting in under the clouds, shedding amber light on the Washington Monument a few blocks to the northwest, highlighting the division, about a third of the way up, where they’d paused work during the Civil War. The town was quiet. Congress had adjourned for the summer without awarding the veterans their bonus. Below them, cars’ tires occasionally hissed through shallow puddles. It was a pleasant enough evening. The next day would be hot and muggy.

“We all have useful information to share,” she allowed. “I wish mine were taken for what it is worth.”

“The level of detail in your report was impressive,” Papa said.

“Thank you.”

“A skeptical listener might ask how it was that you were allowed to see so much.”

This stunned her, more than anything that had happened since they had left Chicago. For a minute she was silent, working it around in her head, seeing just how the episode at Fort Myer could be—would be—misconstrued and teased all out of shape by a particular kind of paranoid, Byzantine Communist mind. A mind like her father’s.

And she saw that there was no way to fix it. Because what had happened had all emerged from contingencies. Ida recognizing her hat. Irene taking a mallet in the kisser. Asquith falling off his horse. And Patton being a very strange man. Not just any old very strange man but that particular type most difficult for Communists to understand. Or even to take seriously.

She had told them some things about her exchanges with Patton. Not the weird stuff about reincarnation and warriors. Just enough to string together the tale of how he had invited her on the tour.

“This was all a setup,” Papa said. “Patton knows who you are—where you come from. We’ve been infiltrated.”

The problem being that if she left out the weird stuff, what was left of the story didn’t hold up. In a way, she couldn’t blame Papa for seeing through it.

“Anything Patton said to you was just a tactic to get you down to that garage and let you get a load of that hardware so that you could come back and scare us silly. Destroy our morale, quash the workers’ revolution before it even begins.”

Next he would talk about how the Cossacks and the Savages had refused to fire on the workers in Petrograd.

“Your friend Billy, those soldiers on the running boards of the armored cars, brandishing their tommy guns—they aren’t so very different from the Cossacks. Imagine what those armored cars could do for us once their drivers have had their eyes opened to what is really in their best interests!”

She gave up. And like Patton, he assumed that her silence implied her consent. But it was not that at all. She knew Papa to be wrong. It was not so much that he took her for a childish dupe. That smarted. But she was used to it. To be at the receiving end of such finger-wagging lectures was a part of childhood she would relish leaving behind. The crux of it was a thing Papa would never know of and could not understand: what Patton had said to her made sense of her life and gave her a purpose she had been wanting, without even knowing that she wanted it. And to agree that Patton had only been making a fool of her was to strip herself of that dignity and purpose. She might accept the loss of a ball gown but not of that.

Papa was looking at her, trying to work out if his words had struck home. Which they had, but not as he’d intended. He looked vulnerable, and Dawn thought there was some jealousy at work too: not so much of Billy-as-beau but of Patton-as-father. Perhaps he sensed, or even knew, that he wasn’t really her father at all. She smiled, reached out and crooked his neck gingerly in her elbow, and kissed his cheek.

That seemed to settle his mind. “Now,” he said, “about our shipment from Chicago.”

 

Just like anyone else, revolutionary Communist intellectuals had their strengths and weaknesses. Definitely playing to the latter was figuring out how to actually transport a shipment of tommy guns a distance of four miles, as the crow flew, from Potomac Yard to the WESL squat in southwest D.C., between the Smithsonian and the Tidal Basin. The weapons had been shipped from Chicago embedded in a bale of “donated” clothes on a four-by-four-foot cargo pallet. Workers at the yard, sympathetic to the Bonus Army, were going to keep an eye on this until a Sally showed up to collect it. To that point it was perfectly routine—which was why they’d chosen to do it that way. Donations like this came in all the time.

The risk posed by that very routine-ness was that it could easily get mixed up with other such shipments. Food, clothing, and other goods came into Potomac Yard every day. These were eventually picked up by BEF sympathizers as they were able to beg or borrow trucks, and driven across the river to Camp Marks, where they were unloaded in a kind of makeshift freight depot.

No sooner had Dawn received confirmation from Chicago that the shipment was on its way than she began to have nightmares about what would ensue if some well-intentioned yard workers were to throw it on the next truck headed toward Camp Marks. Since it ostensibly consisted of donated clothes, it would end up in the Sallies’ tent, where they would cut the bale open and begin sorting through it. That would be bad enough if Dawn and her group were still living at Camp Marks, but now they’d been exiled.

They were going to have to borrow a truck, first of all. They’d have to drive it to Potomac Yard as soon as possible after the arrival of the train carrying the goods. This, at least, played to their strengths; every rail yard in North America was infested with nomads who knew as much about the comings and goings of trains as the Asquiths and Pattons of the world knew about ponies. A bit of Communist cash, posted as a bounty, ensured that they got word of the train’s arrival and the relevant boxcar’s location within the hour.

And borrowing a vehicle looked to be easy. Silent Al was able to make a connection with an unemployed truck driver from Baltimore who was willing to come down on short notice and run the errand as his contribution to the movement. They just had to pay him for gas. Dawn would ride along as passenger. She had picked up a few such shipments at Potomac Yard, and so people there would recognize her and see nothing unusual in her showing up to collect a bale of donated clothing. There was still a lot that could go wrong, but it was the best plan they could improvise.

While they waited, Dawn went shopping. She’d fled from Camp Marks in a ruined ball gown. In addition, new clothes needed to be bought for the six men who had arrived bloody and half-naked. Papa had stashed some cash at a bank but he couldn’t walk in there looking the way he did. So they were back to bootstrapping.

John Pace had money but had to weigh their needs against the fact that he had a couple of thousand starving Communists to feed. So it was just the kind of mess that Communists loved to argue about in eight-hour meetings. Those deliberations generally ended in deadlocks broken by assertive leaders who used raw power to do whatever they wanted.

Pace, a vigorous Detroit Communist and an ex-marine, had risen to the top of WESL following an already legendary madcap journey to D.C., dodging cops the whole way. Lately he had begun leading his men in frank, direct assaults on the White House, only to find it cordoned off, gates chained shut, Secret Service men and cops forming a picket all the way around its grounds, more cops posted on all the nearby streets stopping any man who tried to go that way.

But a respectable-looking young lady might be able to walk by and reconnoiter.

Pace had no difficulty employing women. One almost got the impression from him that, during his military career, he had been disappointed often enough by the failings of men that he was open to giving the female sex a try, and perhaps to just switching over altogether. Many of his best recruiters were female members of the Young Communists. Without hesitation he gave Dawn some money and told her to go replace some of what had been left behind at Camp Marks. This was to include a “Sally costume” for her and something that Papa would wear to the bank, where he could pick up his dollars from the Comintern and use them to pay Pace back, along with a healthy finance charge that would go to buying flour and potatoes.

Nothing was a secret in the WESL squat, and so Dawn heard grumblings about the folly of spending scarce pennies on bourgeois frippery. But a Red ex-marine was still an ex-marine and Pace was blunt, even brutal, in the way he shut the dissenters up. “Swing by the White House on your way home,” Pace called after her, “and pay a call on Hoover and ask him whether he has any room on the Ellipse. This joint is getting a little crowded.” And he looked pointedly at both the Camp Marks refugees and the grumblers from his own ranks.

Dressed in a borrowed pair of trousers and a man’s shirt, she walked north on Twelfth Street because that was one of the few thoroughfares that would cut across the Mall. She passed by the queer little castle of the Smithsonian on the right just as the Capitol came into view beyond. Having crossed the Mall, she entered into the triangle between Constitution and Pennsylvania, a slum of mostly derelict commercial buildings that were going to be razed so that government structures could be put up. In the meantime they had become infested with homeless veterans and other squatters, to the point where Dawn would have felt uncomfortable walking there had so many cops not been out that day.

North of Pennsylvania the neighborhood began to settle down, with office buildings and such businesses as banks, drugstores, and cafés as served the people who worked in them. Dawn turned east and began heading toward Chinatown. On this heading if she walked far enough she would reach Union Station, with its tempting menu of trains going anywhere but here. Along the way, if you knew where to look, were a few thrift shops—just about the only kind of business doing well these days.

Three hours later she came out the other end of Chinatown dressed as a normal human woman of the era. From each hand depended a few shopping bags containing trousers, shirts, and underwear for Papa, Booker, Al, and the others, as well as some odds and ends John Pace had asked her to pick up and notions requested by some of the women. Slung over her shoulder was a long package she’d picked up in a pawnshop on the spur of the moment.

Her next assignment was to reconnoiter the approaches to the White House, which was a long walk back the way she had just come. She decided to cut south on Third toward the west front of the Capitol. This would get her to Pennsylvania, which would of course lead to the White House, thirteen blocks west-northwest. It would also take her right past Camp Glassford, which was Commander Waters’s command post. This was situated in an abandoned Ford dealership and a derelict armory all of two thousand feet from the Capitol Rotunda. Navigating there was easy because it was surrounded by cranes with wrecking balls, visible from several blocks away. The wrecking balls were idle, since the buildings they were supposed to be demolishing had been occupied by veterans these past several weeks. Waters had surrounded the building with Khaki Shirts. As Dawn drew closer she began to feel mildly apprehensive that one of them might recognize her as the Communist who’d been kicked out of Camp Marks a couple of days previously. At the same time, though, she rather enjoyed the idea of tweaking their noses in a place where they could not enforce their brand of martial law and summary justice. As it turned out, they were too busy smoking cigarettes and bullshitting with local cops to pay her any notice. According to the latest news, Waters had worked out some kind of deal to begin evacuating at least some people from some of these condemned buildings the next day, so they had a lot to talk about.

She turned down Seventh Street to get back to the Mall, then cut diagonally across it back to the Smithsonian. Only a few blocks behind that was the WESL squat, where she was able to deliver her purchases to those who were waiting for them. Papa took delivery of a suit of clothes, used, ill-fitting, but presentable enough that he wouldn’t get thrown out of a bank. He took scant notice of the delivery, though, because he was in the middle of a conversation with a hobo who had just come up out of Potomac Yard bearing news: their shipment had come in from Chicago.

 

In all honesty, part of Dawn hoped that the whole thing would go sideways and that the guns would end up being discovered by astonished Sallies at Camp Marks. There was nothing in the shipment traceable to Dawn, her father, or their confederates in Chicago. The weapons would most likely be turned over to the cops, and thereby be kept out of the hands of Papa, John Pace, and their company of deluded Communists.

Alas, all went perfectly. Dawn found herself in the passenger seat of a flatbed truck pulling out of Potomac Yard at 10:30 in the morning of a fine July day with the pallet strapped down in the back. It was what was described in the crime sections of newspapers as a clean getaway. Resting across her lap was a long, thin parcel containing her pawnshop purchase.

Where to go from here had almost been an afterthought. The plan had come together slapdash as Papa and the others, still recovering from the beatings inflicted on them at Camp Marks, had traded more or less harebrained versions. Listening to them, it had become evident to Dawn that they simply didn’t understand how big and heavy the shipment was. A single hundred-round drum magazine for a Thompson submachine gun, loaded with .45-caliber rounds, weighed ten pounds. The gun itself weighed another ten. The shipment consisted of two dozen guns and four dozen loaded magazines. So the ordnance alone weighed over seven hundred pounds. The clothing in which it was packed weighed a few hundred more. This pallet was four feet square and six feet tall, encased in planks and plywood; it weighed at least a hundred pounds empty. None of the men in the room understood the practicalities. Obviously the shipment could not be broken down at Potomac Yard. It first had to be taken somewhere. Somewhere secret, somewhere safe, with enough room to break it open and extract the weaponry. Only then could it be taken, a few pieces at a time, to the WESL squat and handed out to whichever two dozen men Papa and John Pace deemed most battle-ready.

The only other men in that room who seemed to understand the practicalities were Silent Al and John Pace. But Pace had a couple thousand starving Communists to look after and couldn’t follow the conversation for more than five minutes at a stretch. So, as much as Dawn hated to reward Silent Al for his wandering eyes, she finally made the fateful-seeming decision to actually make eye contact with this phantom who had been haunting her peripheral vision for weeks. She’d never looked straight at him before, for fear she’d be caught looking. So there was almost a palpable shock, like grasping a live wire. She feared he’d be hungrier, more of a creep. But after holding her gaze for a couple of seconds he just nodded, like a sergeant who’d been given an order, and started talking to the room. I’ll take it from here, ma’am. She watched him as he talked and was dismayed to find that he was attractive. Bigger, more man and less boy than Billy Bach. Maybe even the kind of young man who would meet with Patton’s approval.

He settled matters. For when it came to a discussion of guns and trucks, they’d only listen to a man. And Silent Al, to his credit, said exactly what Dawn would’ve. What she had, in fact, been saying. But he said it calmly, in a low, steady voice that brooked no argument. And the very fact that he had, to this point, been silent most of the time, made his words just that more potent.

And so it was that they had got word of a disused barn in the countryside just outside of Alexandria, only a few miles west of Potomac Yard. Close enough that you could walk it in an hour or so. But that wouldn’t be necessary, since it was only half a mile from a rural train station serviced by three of the lines that converged from various parts of Virginia on D.C.’s Union Station. The bank had foreclosed on the farm and kicked everyone out, so all the buildings were vacant, boarded up with signs proclaiming them bank property. Breaking into the house would draw attention—the bank’s dicks would be on the lookout for squatters—but they could probably get away with hiding some goods in an old barn for a day or two. They didn’t want to arouse any suspicions by descending on the place in force, so it was decided that Silent Al would hike to the place on foot before dawn, jimmy the door open, and await the truck.

Which was how it happened. The crate was too heavy even for two men and Dawn to move, so once they’d got the barn door closed they pried it open and began tossing the clothes into the corner, shaking out each piece to make sure there were no small parts wrapped up in it. For some parts of the Tommy gun, such as the wooden butt stock and the receiver—a long, heavy steel rail, intricately machined—were too obvious to miss. But there were smaller bits like the slotted compensator that fitted to the muzzle and a small but very important piece of brass called the Blish lock, that could easily get lost. Layer by layer they peeled the clothes away, working by the light of the summer sun slanting in through cracks between the barn’s weather-beaten planks, angling to bring gleaming metal into those blades of yellow light. The small but incredibly massive drum magazines, pregnant with lead. The front grips—beautifully carved wood with grooves sculpted for the fingers. The trigger frames where all of the small intricate levers and mechanisms were interconnected. For though they’d specified that the guns be shipped assembled, that was something of a relative term—they had been cleaned up and packed as large sub-assemblies that could be snapped together in moments to produce a ready-to-fire submachine gun. One by one Dawn handed the parts down to Silent Al, who arranged them in rows and grids on a tarp he’d laid out on the dirt floor. They’d sent the driver down the road to the train station to get a cup of coffee and a slice of pie—there was no reason he needed to see any of this. By the time he returned, the back of the truck was bare except for the wooden pallet. He accepted his gas money plus an additional five from Silent Al and went on his way.

“I’ve never laid eyes on one of these before,” said Silent Al, “except in gangster movies, of course.” They were alone in the barn, looking at the parts—twenty-four of each. Something in the precision with which Silent Al had laid them out on the tarp spoke of an orderly mind.

“I have,” Dawn said, “and I’ve been studying up on it. Army manuals in the Library of Congress. It’s all there. And now here.” She tapped the side of her head. This caused Silent Al to look at her, instead of the guns, and she found she didn’t mind it. If he’d been the kind to get fresh with her, he’d have made his move by now. He hadn’t. She picked up a front grip and a receiver, after just a bit of exploratory fumbling, and was able to snap them together. On went the barrel and the bull-nosed compensator with its row of neatly machined vent slots in the upper surface. Fiery gases would erupt from those and help keep the muzzle from climbing. Remembering first to pull the charging bolt back, she snapped on the trigger assembly, and the butt stock to that. After the first couple of parts went together, Silent Al picked up some for himself and began to follow her lead. In a few minutes each of them assembled a complete tommy gun. But Dawn refrained from attaching a magazine, since only trouble could come from that.

She’d almost forgotten about the long parcel she had brought with her that morning. The truck driver had handed it down to her before pulling away. She now unwrapped it and pulled out a timeworn but sturdy-enough violin case.

“You have got to be kidding me,” said Silent Al.

She opened it up, removed a violin, and tossed it onto the pile of clothes.

“Apparently it’s real,” she told him. It was gratifying to see him so transfixed with amazement. “Not just a gag in gangster movies. You really can fit one of these things in a violin case.” She laid the case open on the tarp, then picked up a wooden stock. It was the biggest single piece. If she could fit that in, she could find room for everything else. She found that it would fit neatly into the narrow end of the case where the neck of the violin would normally go. Having sorted that, she picked up a receiver and one of those ten-pound drum magazines.

Silent Al was as yet unable to make sense of this. “What are you doing?” he finally asked. “I mean, I see you’re putting one into a violin case. But is it just a gag or—”

“Revolutionary discipline,” Dawn said with a slight roll of the eyes. “Look, Papa has been entrusted with a lot of money by the International. Some of it’s in Chicago—stashed here and there in secret places. Now, the deal is that we paid half up front for the guns and half on delivery. As soon as Papa has proof of delivery, he’ll cable the boys in Chicago and let ’em know where to fetch the other half of the money. Since he can’t be here to count the guns, he wants me to bring one back. A sample. Just so he can lay eyes on it. So if the International gives him any static about how he handled the money, he can tell ’em a good story. Since I’m going to have to get back to the squat on the train, I need a way to carry the sample that won’t draw attention. So, yesterday, when I was out running errands for John Pace, I saw this in a pawnshop window and said to myself—”

“That’s the ticket,” said Silent Al with a nod.

“Exactly. Tradecraft. I can pass for a high school gal. A high school gal carrying a violin in Northern Virginia is no big deal. A gangster in a sharp suit carrying one around Chicago, on the other hand—”

Silent Al nodded.

As Dawn had been explaining these matters, she had been fitting more parts into the violin case, rearranging them as she went, jigsawing them together. She guessed a proper gangster would have custom-carved niches made to cradle the parts and keep them from rattling. She had to make do by pulling small garments out of the donated clothes pile and stuffing them into vacancies between the parts, wiggling each one to make sure there was no metal-to-metal contact. When she was finished, she had to put her whole weight on the lid to hold it closed while Silent Al snapped the latches. In the middle was a lock, just a cheap thing with a sheet-metal key sticking out of it, a dirty scrap of pink ribbon tied through a hole in the handle. With a screwdriver anyone could have pried it open in seconds. But Dawn reckoned it was good insurance against the case popping open by accident and spilling clothes and gun parts across a train carriage, so she turned the key, pulled it out, and slipped the ribbon over her wrist.

“Speaking of tradecraft,” Silent Al said, “we should go back into D.C. separately.”

“I agree.”

“I’ll give you a head start. I’ll close the place up, cover the tracks. The goods’ll be safe here until we can come back with a car or something and pick up the other twenty-three.”

“That is all fine with me,” Dawn said. And it truly was; she wanted no further part of those things.

“See you back at the squat, Dawn.”

“See you.”

 

Fortunately the violin case had a shoulder strap. Carrying it by the handle wouldn’t have been so bad had it only contained a violin, but with twenty pounds of ordnance crammed inside it was a beast of a thing to lug around. She slung it over one shoulder. In lieu of a purse she’d been carrying a canvas bag packed with a canteen of water, lunch, and a few other necessaries to get her through the day. She slung that over the other shoulder and began trudging down the road to the train station, which was only fifteen minutes’ walk away. This was just a whistle-stop at a crossroads that sported a post office and a café. Not wanting to draw any attention from curious locals, she just settled down on a bench at the station to await the next train headed into D.C. This pulled in about half an hour later and got her to Union Station half an hour after that. She considered detraining one stop early, since that would have saved her a bit of a walk. But her route from Union Station would take her by Camp Glassford again, retracing her steps from yesterday. She wanted to see what was going on there, and possibly bring some useful intelligence back to her comrades at the WESL squat.

The street below the cranes and the wrecking balls was much more crowded today. She found herself at the back of a mob, encumbered by the violin case and the shoulder bag, wondering what was going on, and trying to piece a picture together from rumors. Waters, she already knew, had agreed to begin peacefully evacuating some buildings this morning. But this didn’t look peaceful. A plurality of the rumors had it that the cops had double-crossed them and begun dragging Bonus Marchers out wholesale, and that a riot had happened. She saw nothing that answered to her idea of a riot. Those buildings had always looked like the aftermath of a civil disturbance, with missing walls exposing their rooms and staircases to the elements. Looking into those vacant cells now as she backtracked west along Pennsylvania, Dawn saw, not Khaki Shirts but blue-uniformed D.C. cops turning over mattresses and dumping out footlockers. Searching, she guessed, for Red weapons.

Her instinct was to retrace her steps from yesterday, cutting diagonally southwest across the Mall—the most direct route back to the WESL squat. But Pace had wanted information about how the police were deployed around the White House. And much might have changed in the past few hours, if cops had really been pulled away from there to quell the “riot” at Camp Glassford. This might be the chance Pace had been dreaming of to smoke a cigar in the Oval Office and hang a red banner from the North Portico. So she walked down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was slow going. Men of the BEF had begun swarming up from Camp Marks, clogging the streets. The avenue was jammed with cops, vets, press, and onlookers, and she had to fight against the flow of people. But as the crowd thinned, closer to the White House, she began to make better time, moving up between the slum on her left and the tidier district that faced it.

So it was that she had a clear view of a lone man on horseback who rode out of a gate where one of the curving roads surrounding the Ellipse connected to the intersection of Fifteenth Street—the eastern frontier of the White House grounds—and Pennsylvania, directly ahead of her. He came from the Zero Milestone. Helmeted soldiers opened the gate for him, saluted as he went past, then locked it behind. The man rode out into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue like a knight errant. His helmet gleamed, his jackboots were polished, and his jodhpurs were crisp. In his left hand he held the reins of his white horse, a great charger, at least seventeen hands, but the reins were a mere formality, so perfectly united were the wills of man and mount. In his right hand he held a drawn saber, pommel down, tip pointed heavenward. His blue eyes gazed down the avenue toward the Capitol, a white vista smudged around its foundations by the mob that had gathered before Camp Glassford. In this attitude he rode right past her. “Miss Glendive,” he said, “it is an unexpected pleasure to meet you once again.”

“Major Patton,” she said, “what is about to happen?”

“You of all young ladies in this city are in a position to know. Good day, Miss Glendive.”

“Good day, Major Patton.”

She walked the last block to Fifteenth, where she could look through the fence and see into the grounds of the Ellipse. Diagonally across rose the Lincoln Memorial in the distance, and in the greater distance the grave-sown hill of Fort Myer. From there the Landesjäger corps had arrived—no, were still arriving—drawing up in orderly ranks in the middle of the Ellipse. Pacing to and fro before them was General MacArthur in his sunglasses and his jodhpurs, shadowed by his aide, Eisenhower.

She could have seen more, but here was where she took off at a run southward on Fifteenth Street. Three long blocks took her to Constitution, where she dodged honking traffic to the Mall. Curving around the eastern flank of the hill that supported the Washington Monument she got to a little wooded park on Independence near Fourteenth, where the Communists liked to have picnics and play ball, as it was just around the corner from the WESL squat.

And a couple of minutes later, she was there—though it was hard to know what “there” really meant in a slum with a population of two thousand, divided among several buildings distributed over a whole square block.

She went to the room where she’d last seen John Pace and was dismayed but not surprised to find that neither he nor any of the other leaders was present.

On her career through the squat she had picked up a retinue who now devoted attention to her sweat-drenched hair and clothing, her heaving chest and red face. What, some of them wanted to know, had she been doing all day? Others—mostly children—were just curious. Some actually had useful things to tell her: her father had gone with Pace and most of the other able-bodied men in the direction of Camp Glassford hours ago, when they had heard about the riot. Dawn asked, “Did anyone go to Virginia?” Because asking Is anyone fetching the machine guns? seemed indiscreet. “Booker got a phone call from Silent Al,” came the answer. “He and a couple others got in a taxicab.”

She considered it.

“Evacuate,” she said. “MacArthur is right over there, just across the Mall, with armored cars and machine guns and men who believe that the only way of dealing with people like us is slaughter. I don’t know if they are first coming here or to Camp Glassford. Given how they feel about Communists—”

And then it was an hour, or what seemed like it, of that: going to all the separate rooms and buildings and shacks and tents to bear witness, spread the word, and argue with each little self-appointed leader. Helping to organize and pack all that these people would need to survive what might be weeks on the road. And packing herself, stuffing food, clothing, anything else she might need into that shoulder bag, now almost as heavy as the violin case.

Followed by a sudden awareness—almost a letdown—that the cavalry had not come.

Which meant that they must instead have gone to Camp Glassford. Patton had been riding that way to scout the battlefield.

She was too tired and heavy-laden to run. She alternated between walking and jogging, making her way down the Mall, the Capitol ahead of her, smoke drifting across its front from the small war going on two thousand feet northwest of it.

No, she knew as she got closer, that wasn’t smoke but some kind of chemical stuff. Tear gas. And the war was already over. The Landesjäger had finished their work here and moved on, headed for Camp Marks. Patton would be riding his white horse over the Eleventh Street Drawbridge, the green Salvation Army tent coming up on his right, reflected in the gleaming blade of his saber.

Camp Glassford was even more of a junkpile than it had been a few hours ago. Cops, vets, firefighters, ambulance drivers, looters, and journalists were all ranging through its smoky, ruined buildings like armies each fighting a different war. She might have searched it for a week and not found her papa had she not noticed a waterfall of red fabric trailing from a shattered window high up on the face of the old Ford dealership. It was a corner office with a view over Constitution Avenue and the Capitol. Papa had once dreamed of flying that banner from the Treasury or the White House. But she could clearly see him arriving here in the moment before it all went crazy. Seeing MacArthur and his cavalry coming down from the Ellipse, his eye would have flown to this window. He’d have hoisted the duffel bag onto his scabbed back and made the long, wheezing climb up the staircase—exposed by the collapse of a wall—to the top, and unfurled the banner of revolution, rallying the workers to the hammer and the sickle.

She was breathing through Patton’s handkerchief by the time she reached the top floor, for the tear gas was still strong enough to choke her. A cloud of it came roiling out of the office door when she pushed it open, and she had to stand back and let it disperse.

The correct—albeit bourgeois-sentimental—response to seeing Papa’s body curled up on the linoleum was tears, but she was already weeping because of the gas. A couple of the grenades had been lobbed in through the same window he’d used to unfurl the banner. They must have filled the place with gas in seconds. He’d have been blue in the face already from his run up the Mall and his ascent of the stairs. No Scarface, he was not able to retreat from the fumes, fight his way down the stairs, and face his attackers on the street with tommy gun blazing.

Dawn laid him out straight on the floor, as rigor mortis had not yet taken hold. She pulled the banner back inside and tucked it over him as a shroud.

Re-slinging the bag and the violin case across raw shoulders, she walked down the stairs, exited the building, and strode out of Camp Glassford, then south across the front of the Capitol. She was tired of walking, but she had far to go yet. Half an hour’s hike took her down to the strip of parks and marinas along the channel that led to the Tidal Basin. She gazed across the water at the polo grounds, but no match was being played today. She strolled alone down the waterside promenade of Fort McNair, to Buzzard Point where Anacostia Creek came together with the channel and went round back of the Army War College to the docks where they kept the recreational canoes and the rowboats. All was in disarray there because a big steamer had put in from some base downriver, bringing troops to reinforce the Landesjäger. To make a berth for it, boats had been moved aside and beached wherever there was space for them. Dawn had not foreseen this, but it served her purposes. She availed herself of a rowboat. Distracted by events at Camp Marks, no one noticed. She pulled out into the Potomac and the current took her, trying to sweep her out to sea. Tempting as that was in a way, she put her back to Virginia and pulled hard for it, rowing due west. Her view of the Anacostia Flats could hardly have been better. The Landesjäger were rolling across it in tanks and on horseback, but the fires they had set moved faster. At the beginning of the voyage she was able to make out individual riders and vehicles, and fancied she picked Patton out of all the confusion. Farther out she could only see whole shanties as they began to steam, then smoke, then burn at the flame-front. By the time her rowboat went aground at Potomac Yards, Camp Marks was a slit of flame supporting a column of smoke that covered half the sky.

Workers had gathered at the edge of the water to watch it and were bemused to see a girl turn up in an army rowboat and climb out with a military surplus bag on one shoulder and a violin case on the other. She sensed that they were too shocked by what they had witnessed to think of anything improper. “When’s the next westbound freight?” she asked them. “I’m headed for Chicago.”