ON A SULTRY SATURDAY in July 1943, Lieutenant Max Zagreb decided to devote his day off to doing nothing. That wore thin by afternoon, and he dug himself out from under a pile of pulp magazines—the slicks just reminded him of Ziska and his subscription-salesman cover—and went to see a movie.
The feature at the Fox was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, but he was mostly interested in seeing the newsreels. The war had busted wide open beginning on June 22, when B-24 Liberators from the Ford Willow Run plant carpet-bombed the Ruhr industrial valley, flattening German munitions factories from Recklinghausen to Antwerp. Then on July 10, America invaded Sicily, pouring onto the south coast from the Pantelleria jumping-off point and plowing inland behind Patton’s Seventh Army. Montgomery’s Eighth landed three days later. Caught between the Americans and British, the Italians began to retreat like Mussolini’s forehead. The Pathé cameras dwelt on teenage gunners poking bucket-size cartridges into boiler-size breeches, but the real story was that the war was being fought between Henry Ford and Alfried Krupp, wobbly-kneed old men with smelting furnaces for hearts. The capacity crowd applauded each dubbed-in explosion. Zagreb figured they were there for the air-conditioning.
The auditorium was silent through the next segment, a follow-up on the Detroit riots. Some of Governor Kelly’s 1,000 National Guardsmen were shown patrolling the littered streets with M-l rifles, backed up by five thousand federal troops in jeeps and armored cars dispatched by President Roosevelt, who on Monday, June 21, declared martial law in the city. Carpets of shattered glass glittered on the sidewalks and pavement, looted suits and dresses abandoned in the getaway rush festooned the sills of empty display windows, a group of patrolmen and civilian volunteers wearing special armbands were shown rocking an overturned Chevy coupe from side to side in an effort to right it. The narrators stentorian voice intoned the statistics for the two-day toot: thirty-four dead, nine of them colored; six hundred injured; property loss nearly two million dollars; one rumor of rape and murder on Belle Isle, false.
Missing from the newsreel were a number of details that Zagreb himself would never repeat, lest he risk both his job and his draft-exempt status. Four colored men removed from the Woodward Avenue streetcar by eight patrolmen on the promise of safe passage, then turned over to a white mob and beaten to death. A colored boy, unidentified, stomped and pummeled by a gang of white men and boys in T-shirts until his brains leaked out his ears on the front steps of the Federal Building. An eyewitness reported on camera the stoning and beating death of Joseph Horatiis, a white doctor answering a call in the riot area, by Negroes who dragged him from his car. No footage went to the carloads of rednecks armed with rifles and shotguns, quartering the streets for colored game like drunken deer hunters.
It was no wonder, caught (like the Italians) between the rape of Detroit and the liberation of Europe, the fate of a five-time killer (perhaps six; sheriff’s deputies in Washtenaw County had identified a body found in a patch of woods near Willow Run as a girl last seen attending a movie with a man whose description closely matched Ziska’s), tracked down and shot by police when he refused to surrender, barely made the national wires, and then only one paragraph.
He left the theater before the final confrontation between the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s flattopped monster. It reminded him too much of his marriage. At Michigan, he was held up through two light changes by a procession of cars headed for Jefferson, part of a publicized memorial service on Belle Isle for the victims of the riots. It included rattletrap touring cars filled with armband-wearing members of Reverend White’s church and officials of Otis Saunders’ Double-V Committee, a Negro community group; Cadillacs and Lincolns containing the Junior League wives of automobile manufacturers; various motorists and passengers unknown, probably friends and family of the slain; Robert Leroy Parker Gitchfield’s unmistakable Auburn, Gidgy at the wheel showing more brotherly regard than Zagreb would have expected of the most notorious black marketeer in Paradise Valley—and wasn’t that Beatrice Blackwood, the Forest Club’s most popular barmaid, riding shotgun?—and a couple in a battered Model A, colored kid with a face that looked like it was still healing from the events of last month, and his pretty light-colored girlfriend, both dressed in black. Zagreb felt vaguely certain he’d met the young man recently.
It bothered him, not that it should have. He came into contact with so many people in the course of an investigation; nobody could expect him to remember them all. They didn’t all look alike to him. He prided himself on that.