Red, White, and the Blues

by Walker, Rysa

  “You might want to get past them bothering you if you plan on anything permanent with that pretty little blonde you were trading whispers with up in the balcony.” He gives me a serpentine smile, quite pleased with himself for having spied on me at the rally. Or, more likely, for having slipped someone a few dollars to do the spying for him, thinking back. Probably the cop that Madi spotted.

  “She’s a colleague,” I say. “Nothing more.”

  “Of course. Do either of you actually work for Henry Luce?” he asks, referring to the owner of Time and Life magazines.

  “No. But I’d like to. I’m thinking with the right story . . .” I shrug.

  Dennis’s eyes go icy over the rim of his highball glass.

  I shake my head. “No, you misunderstand. I have no intention of revealing your secret.”

  “Hmph. But you’re not above leveraging the fact that you know it in order to finagle an interview. I must confess I’m not exactly in awe of your moral code.”

  The feeling is mutual, I think, flashing back to the article I read about his contributions on policy as secretary of the interior. Dennis’s arguments about the ill effects of diversity on national cohesion had been largely responsible for the mass westward migration of most people of color, non-Christians, and leftists. No, he hadn’t personally put them onto the trucks, but he’d argued as early as 1936 that a strong, authoritarian state would convince minorities—racial or ideological—that the risk of fighting back was not worth the reward. After a short period of time, they’d relent, and the country could focus on rebuilding an economy shattered by global depression.

  But I smile pleasantly, as if he’s joking. And he may well be, for all I know. “My only goal in writing that was to get my foot in the door. Because this whole thing has me baffled. I’ve followed your writings about some of the baser elements of the fascist movement in this country, so I was a bit surprised to see your name on the poster for tonight’s rally. You’ve never been a fan of the Bund, or of the Coughlinites, for that matter. So while everyone else is rattling on about the poster saying Brother instead of Father, I’m staring at your name, wondering what made you decide to cast your lot with the reactionary, unintellectual side of the movement.”

  “Intellect will only take you so far,” he says. “You want to know something truly ironic? I have advanced degrees. I have the ear of political figures at the national level. And still, in some sense, I had more raw power as a five-year-old prodigy touring the nation in my white robe, spewing the Bible verses my mother taught me. Religious fervor can bond people, make them act outside their self-interest. It is a powerful force on its own, but coupled with nationalism, it could make these states truly united. And the Cyrists don’t even demand that you put aside other religious faiths. As Coughlin noted tonight, it is the perfect civic religion to bind a fractious nation.”

  “You have to admit that it’s a major change on your part, however. The last time I heard you speak in person, you said that Coughlin was a hypocrite. Listening tonight, I couldn’t help thinking it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether that windbag and his pilot are wearing a crucifix or a Cyrist cross. His listeners aren’t tuning in for religious guidance. But you deciding to climb down out of the ivory tower and take your ideas to the masses . . . now, that’s news.”

  It was intended as flattery, but as I say the words, I realize there’s a lot of truth there. Not that the crowd had paid much attention to Dennis at the rally. They applauded politely on the few occasions that he mentioned Germany, Hitler, or said something bad about Roosevelt and his policies. There simply wasn’t enough red meat in Lawrence Dennis’s measured, cerebral speech to excite that crowd. I’m sure he was relieved that he’d been the warm-up act for Coughlin and not the reverse. But having Coughlin and Dennis at a Bund event, and both of them voicing at least some degree of approval for the Cyrist faith, was a big step toward unifying if not the nation, then at least a fractious political movement.

  “Did I actually call Coughlin a hypocrite?” he asks, sounding a bit amused.

  “I don’t think you said it directly, but it was definitely implied. When did he convince you to endorse the Cyrists?”

  “He didn’t convince me of anything. I haven’t even spoken with the man. But I have . . . contacts. Sources who told me Coughlin was finally going to go through with this conversion that has been rumored for the past few months. I was right about one thing, though. He is a hypocrite. And believe me, I saw more than my fair share of those as a boy.”

  The temptation to say that he sees one in the mirror each morning when he shaves is strong. I think there’s a slight chance I would have said it if the woman at the table behind us—not the blonde with the husky laugh, but her black friend—hadn’t pushed her chair back into Dennis’s, drawing his attention away.

  As the woman heads toward the bar, Dennis sticks his arm out to block her way. He says something I don’t catch, and she picks his arm up by the sleeve and ducks under it. “You are so bad, Lonnie.”

  “Well, I certainly can be if that’s what you want.”

  The woman turns around, one hand on her hip, and cocks her head to the side. That’s when I spot the magnolia in her hair and recognize her as Billie Holiday. “Oh, you could not keep up with me, old man. And I’m not in the mood to listen to you flap your mouth all night.”

  Yeah, Rich is not going to be happy that I didn’t bring him along. His one annoyance about his trip to Café Society was that his mentor’s research had been focused on the period during and just after World War II, so he scheduled their jump for 1941, when the vocalist was Lena Horne. Rich said she was good, but he’d really wanted to see Holiday.

  She turns to look at me. “Now this one, though . . . why didn’t you tell me you had a son?”

  “I don’t,” Dennis says flatly. “And he can’t even afford to buy you a drink.”

  Billie grins. “Well, damn. I can fix that. Hey, Joey?” she calls out to the bartender. “Bring baby boy over here another drink. On me. And make it a bourbon. He needs something stronger than that Rheingold shit if he’s gonna listen to Lonnie’s nonsense.”

  This is greeted by laughter, especially from the blonde she’s been sitting with. The woman raises her glass toward Billie, who responds with a demure little curtsy and then sashays over to the microphone in the corner, near the center of a very minimalist stage. Someone tried to fancy it up a bit by adding a small fringe of curtain over the ductwork, but it really only serves to draw attention to it.

  “Oh, don’t pout, dahling,” the blonde drawls to Dennis, placing a well-manicured hand on his arm. “It’s so unattractive. One day, mark my words, you’ll wear that insult as a badge of honor. Our Billie is going to be a star.”

  I’d pegged her as older based on her voice, but she’s probably in her thirties. Exceptionally pretty, with dramatic eyes. Her face is familiar, too, but I can’t place it.

  She glances over at the bar, then says, “Damn it all. I need to pee, and that communist ninny is about to turn the lights out.” With that, she hurries toward the stairs, tottering slightly on her high heels.

  “And there we have southern aristocracy at its finest,” Dennis mumbles. “The moral turpitude of the political elites on full display.”

  I sit there for several seconds trying to think of a response, but it’s hard to know what to say when I still can’t place the woman’s face.

  “She’s wrong about one thing, though,” Dennis says. “It’s Barney’s brother who’s the communist. Barney himself is just a fellow traveler. Or, even more likely, an unwitting stooge.”

  The lights do indeed go out, sending the room into a pitch-black, eerie silence.

  Well, almost pitch black. On the other side of the stage, at a small table near the stairs, I spot three circles of purple light. I can’t make out their faces, though. Observers, I’d guess, since the rules state explicitly that the players may not enter the field again until we’ve made our three moves
. Although I suppose it could be players, if this was a location where they made one of their three moves.

  A slow instrumental, almost a dirge, begins, and the blonde’s name finally comes to me, probably because I stopped actively trying to remember it. Bankhead. Tallulah Bankhead. Broadway star, daughter of William Bankhead, speaker of the House of Representatives. The husky laugh was her trademark, and she’d put it to full use as the Black Widow on the TV show Batman, which I watched to prepare for a trip to 1967, when the show was all the rage.

  The toilet flushes upstairs as the instrumental continues. A moment later, a single spotlight comes on, and Billie Holiday’s distinctive voice fills the room.

  “Strange Fruit” was an unlikely hit, but several months from now, Holiday will find a producer willing to take a chance on this beautiful, bleak, and undeniably morbid tune about lynching. It’s a powerful song, with rich imagery, and it grabbed me the first time I heard it. But here, in this room, it’s mesmerizing. You can almost smell the magnolias and burning flesh as she sings.

  And that’s when I realize why Lonnie Lawrence Dennis insisted on this particular club tonight, rather than someplace closer to the rally. He’s making his point without having to say a word. We might be alike in some sense, but I didn’t grow up as a black child in the South, during an era when lynching was the regional sport.

  I don’t get to judge his choices.

  The spotlight goes out when the song ends, and when the lights come back up, Billie Holiday is gone. So are the three observers. For a moment, the place remains completely quiet. Then the band begins a slow, soft number, table service resumes, and the club gradually comes back to life.

  Dennis is staring down at my sports jacket when I look back in his direction. A paranoid voice says that he might see the light of the CHRONOS key through the breast pocket, but that would have been astoundingly unlikely even before. It’s virtually impossible now, with CHRONOS erased from the timeline. And if that were the case, he’d definitely have noticed the light from the three medallions that were on the other side of the club. It’s much more likely that he glimpsed my shoulder holster. I’m not used to wearing one, and these clothes aren’t exactly tailor made.

  “It’s a moving song, isn’t it?” Dennis says. “Even for someone like yourself, who was born after a decade of progress.” He puts a sarcastic emphasis on progress, and the difference in our ages is closer to twenty years than ten. But I don’t interrupt.

  “It’s slow progress, and much of it has taken the nation as a whole in the wrong direction,” he continues. “But I’m sure you’re fine with that. You’ve got friends who can make your eyes a bright baby blue when you feel like it. In my case, however, I had to make a choice, and I made it. I could choose this world or that one. And if I chose that one, odds were good I’d end up being that strange fruit Billie was just singing about. Because, for good or for ill, it is simply not in my nature to defer to a stupid man.”

  There are dozens of bones I could pick within that statement. For one thing, it contradicts his long-standing claim that minorities would not resist a strong government. Or maybe he just thinks he’s the only black man smart or brave enough to fight for his own interests. If I were here as part of a normal CHRONOS mission, I’d dig a bit. Try to find out what makes him tick. Hell, if I just met the guy at a bar, I’d do that. But far too much is riding on this stupid game for me to risk Dennis shutting me down entirely.

  “Can’t blame you there, sir. Like I said, I take no issue with your choices. We all have to find our way in the world, to play the cards we’re dealt, even if the deal isn’t always a fair one.” It’s hard not to roll my eyes at my own words. It’s like I was trying to see how many trite platitudes I could cram into a single sentence.

  “You think I’m complaining about my lot in life?” he says with a touch of amusement. “I got a better hand from the dealer than the vast majority of clueless Aryan dolts heiling their ersatz Hitler in that auditorium tonight. A better deal, for that matter, than any of the other brainless idiots who stood at that podium. It doesn’t take much to fool them, because they simply can’t imagine that a man from an ‘inferior’ race could be this much smarter than they are.”

  Dennis nods toward the bar, where a slight, pale man with a receding hairline is talking to the bartender. “That goes double for the crowd on the other side of the political divide. Barney Josephson over there thinks the only way a Negro performer can become a star is if some smart Jew like him gives them a break. At least the Nazis are honest with their disdain. He thinks he’s raising consciousness with that damn song, but he’s just making money off the blood of Negro fools not blessed with the brains to allow them to escape. And the Holiday girl isn’t much better. She’s in the back room or out in the alley right now, letting a rich dyke whose family legally owned women like her a few generations back cop a feel in exchange for a bit of cocaine. But I guess that’s progress, hmm?”

  The waiter arrives with my bourbon, which he says is courtesy of Lady Day, and a second drink for Dennis, whose glass is now empty. He didn’t place an order, so he must have told the bartender to keep them coming when he stopped at the bar on his way in. And either he’s got a low tolerance for the stuff or else he had a few on his way over, because his words are beginning to slur.

  “Were you still at the rally when the police let the lunatics break down the door?” he asks.

  I’d steered clear of this discussion, waiting to see if he broached the topic. Maybe that’s why he’s tossing back the scotch. I’d like to think that, because it would mean there might be a bit of a conscience hiding in there with the man’s ego.

  “Not inside the building,” I say. “I left shortly after your speech. But I heard what happened.”

  “Damn shame. People can’t peaceably assemble in the country these days without fearing for their lives.”

  “Someone said there were children among the dead. Was it the explosion?”

  “Two girls and their mother. And there was no bomb. They were killed by a bunch of Red hoodlums storming the gates.”

  “I didn’t say it was a bomb. I said explosion. Which leads me to a question—who put you up to it?”

  Dennis is silent for a moment. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. But I’m certain that I don’t care for your implication.”

  “I saw the phonograph, Mr. Dennis. Saw the timer, too. And I saw you come out of the storage room. I’m not blaming you for what happened. I just want to know who put you up to it. That’s the real story I’m hunting down.”

  He doesn’t answer for so long that I’m convinced he’s not going to. Then he laughs. “You’re as bad as they are. I don’t think you saw a damn thing today. Definitely not anything you can prove. But leaving that aside, why do you automatically jump to the conclusion that someone put me up to it? Your assumption that I’m the lackey for Coughlin or one of those other fools isn’t just laughable, it’s insulting. Finish your drink and get the hell out.” He tips back his glass, then says, “You know what? Never mind. I’m leaving.”

  He stops at the bar for a moment, then stalks out.

  I’m tempted to follow him and at least try to explain that I wasn’t implying he wasn’t smart enough to be the brains behind the plan. But I’m pretty sure he knows that. It was just an excuse to get out of here. And I can’t think of any other way I could explain what I meant other than telling him the truth—that I know someone, or something, convinced him, because there’s another timeline where tonight’s events did not happen. Since I can’t do that, I might as well give it up and go back to the apartment. Rich and Katherine will be back by now, and we can compare notes.

  I finish the bourbon and settle my tab. Two double scotches have been added, so I guess Dennis’s stop at the bar was just to tell them that I’d be footing the bill.

  The temperature has finally dipped down to where it’s downright chilly when I step out into the night. I turn to head toward the stable
point in the park out of force of habit, and then remember that the only silver lining about CHRONOS being gone is that I don’t have to hike all the way back to my entry point in order for my key to work. All I need to do is duck into the alley or slip behind a dumpster.

  I take a few steps into the shadows between the buildings, but two people are standing near the back door of the club at the far end of the alley. Probably workers taking a smoke break. It’s too dark to even tell if they’re looking my way, so I reverse course.

  As I turn, Lawrence Dennis’s fist smashes into my jaw.

  I stumble back into the brick wall of the building. It’s not the hardest punch I’ve taken, but it’s definitely in the top five. I push away from the wall, raising my fists into a defensive stance, hoping that it was just a lucky punch on his part. He’s got at least thirty pounds on me.

  And, as it happens, he also has a knife.

  “You’ve had that coming since 1936,” he says. “I would have given it to you then if I’d gotten a chance. When you slipped out, I told them I needed a bathroom break and I followed you. So maybe you did see something tonight at the Garden, or maybe you didn’t, but I saw something, too. Saw you up and vanish from an alley between the buildings three years ago. One second you were standing there, staring at your pocket watch, and the next, you were nowhere. So you want to tell me how you did that? While we’re at it, I think I’d like to see that watch. And don’t bother saying you left it at home, because I saw you walking around with it at the rally.”

  “Sorry,” I tell him, raising my voice in hopes that the workers at the other end of the alley will hear us and stay clear. “I’m not giving you my watch. It’s been in the family for generations.”

  That’s true, in a sense. At least a half dozen agents from earlier cohorts used this medallion before I did.