The Drifters by James A. Michener
It was Soft Voice who started the real trouble. Very quietly he asked the others, ‘How do we know she ain’t smugglin’ heroin right now?’ His question was greeted with silence, so he added, ‘I mean, how would we know? If she’s a junkie?’
Bird Man moved very close and asked, ‘You a junkie? You a hophead?’
When she remained silent, Red Face took over and shouted, ‘We spoke to you. You better answer. Why are you a junkie?’
It was now that Gretchen realized: They aren’t going to beat me. If he were going to strike me, he would have done it then. I can stand their abuse … if they don’t beat me. She guessed, from the careful manner in which the men refrained from touching her, that they had received careful orders: Don’t rough up the prisoners … especially girls. And she guessed, too, from the way in which her three interrogators looked from time to time at the plain-clothes man, that he was there to enforce the edict.
Now Soft Voice resumed his argument: ‘How can we be sure she ain’t smugglin’ heroin? Remember that chick had it hidden in her guitar?’ He looked at the plain-clothes man, who nodded, whereupon Soft Voice took the guitar, shook it, stuck his fingers into the center hole, looked at it from various angles, and then in a sudden move which made Gretchen gasp, swung it over his head and smashed it into scattered pieces.
‘Now you better talk,’ Red Face said menacingly, ‘or we’re gonna smash you in exactly the same way.’
‘No heroin here,’ Soft Voice reported as he kicked among the wooden fragments. ‘She probably has it hidden.’ Again there was silence in the room, and Soft Voice repeated almost in a whisper, ‘She’s probably hid it.’ This time there was a much longer silence, which Gretchen could not understand. She was watching the plain-clothes man, who slowly nodded his head.
‘Strip!’ Red Face shouted into her face. ‘I said strip!’
Gretchen, bewildered by a sudden flood of lights and by the menacing faces, made a gesture of incomprehension, so Soft Voice moved closer and said, admonishingly, ‘He told you to strip. To take off your clothes. We want to see where you hid the heroin.’
‘I can’t,’ Gretchen tried to say, but she was so terrified that no sounds came.
‘You sensitive or something?’ Red Face yelled. ‘You sleep with that gang of punks in the car. You screw with them every night. Probably gang-bang. And now you’re sensitive. Lady …’
Bird Man moved in and said, ‘Lady, you’re under arrest. You face a whole string of charges. And you are gonna strip. Now!’
Gretchen was so bewildered, she couldn’t move or talk, whereupon Soft Voice came closer to her, holding a heavy leather strap. ‘I’m gonna count to six, and if you haven’t started taking off your clothes, I am gonna beat the livin’ shit out of you. Get goin’.’ He started counting in a menacing whisper. ‘One, two, three,’ and although Gretchen was certain he was not going to strike her, her assurance was diminished by the fact that the man was an obvious psychopath. Of the five, he was the one who might beat her, so in a terrified daze she began unbuttoning her dress. ‘That’s better,’ Soft Voice said reassuringly. ‘We won’t need the strap.’
‘Everything off,’ Red Face commanded. ‘Yes, every goddamned thing. You smart college girls think it’s all right to screw with anybody. New morality, you call it. Well, we’re gonna see some of that new morality.’
Someone giggled, and Soft Voice said, ‘The purpose is we want to see where you have the heroin hidden.’
When Gretchen stood in her panties and bra she hesitated, whereupon Soft Voice screamed at her with a violence that shattered, ‘Everything!’ He grabbed the leather strap again and swung it viciously under her nose. She wavered, and he brought it with terrifying force onto the floor, an inch from her left foot. ‘You strip, goddamn you! Now!’
Trembling, Gretchen unfastened her bra and let it fall away. She was vaguely aware that each of the five men leaned forward. No one spoke, and she rolled down her panties. In the long silence someone sighed, then Soft Voice asked in an insinuating whisper, ‘How would you like that in your Christmas stocking, Woiczinsky?’ The men laughed nervously, then Red Face asked in real perplexity, ‘Lady, why does a dish like you fool around with politics? Why don’t you get yourself some nice young fellow and crawl into bed and have a lot of children?’
‘You got a boyfriend?’ Soft Voice asked. ‘I mean a special one? One you go to bed with regular?’
‘Do you like it in bed?’ Bird Man asked. ‘I mean, do you have real fun when he climbs aboard?’
Gretchen clenched her fists and tried not to faint, but even though she did summon up what little strength she had left, she was ill-prepared for what happened next. ‘Bend over,’ Soft Voice said. When she remained motionless under the lights, he repeated gently, ‘You must bend over now.’ When she still made no move, he brought the strap down beside her foot and screamed, ‘Bend over, you fucking whore!’
‘We want to see where you got the heroin hidden,’ Bird Man said quietly, and for the first time one of the men touched her. Bird Man lifted a metal ruler, placed it gently on her head, and delicately pushed upon it until Gretchen’s forehead was nearly touching the floor. Soft Voice swung one of the bright lamps about until it focused on her rear, then said approvingly, ‘Target for tonight. How you like them apples, Woiczinsky?’
Who approached next, Gretchen could not say, but while Bird Man’s gentle steel ruler kept her head lowered, someone took a pencil and poked at the openings of her body. ‘No heroin here,’ Soft Voice reported.
The men stepped away, and slowly Gretchen resumed an upright position. Looking with anguished eyes at the shadowy circle, she uttered her only words: ‘You are really pigs.’
From the darkness Woiczinsky leaped at her, struck her violently across the head with his fist, and knocked her sprawling into a corner.
‘You stupid shit!’ the plain-clothes man shouted. ‘Get him out of here.’
Red Face and Bird Man hustled the young policeman from the room while Soft Voice came to the corner and probed Gretchen with the toe of his shoe. ‘She’s not hurt,’ he told the man in mufti, who threw Gretchen her clothes and said, ‘Get dressed, you slut.’
Appalled, and only now becoming aware of what had happened to her, Gretchen huddled in the corner, trying to sort out her clothes. Her bra was missing and she clumped ineffectively about the room to find it. She was engaged in this futile process when she heard voices in the corridor. They came closer, and someone pushed open the door. With a relief she could not express, she saw that it was the driver of her car, the English major from Yale. He had consulted a lawyer, who had summoned the mayor. These three now entered the room to see Gretchen standing naked among her scattered clothes.
‘What in hell happened here?’ the lawyer demanded.
‘Now, now!’ the mayor said consolingly. ‘There’s nobody hurt.’ He looked at Gretchen and asked, ‘You weren’t sexually ravaged, were you?’
When Gretchen shook her head no, the lawyer said, ‘There’s a lot of ways a girl can be sexually molested.’
‘But there’s only one that counts,’ the mayor said. While Gretchen was getting into her clothes he inspected her face and asked, ‘Nothing broken, is there?’ When he had satisfied himself that no real damage had been done, he said to Gretchen, ‘A mistake, an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. You weren’t hurt in any way, were you?’
Gretchen understood the question, understood its implications. She was being asked to hush up an incident that everyone regretted and whose ventilation could only bring trouble, to her as well as to the others. It was a real temptation for her to say that nothing happened, but when she was about to assent she happened to look at the floor and saw the shattered pieces of the guitar. People in anthority who would willfully smash a guitar because it was the symbol of things they could not comprehend deserved no protection.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, fully aware of what she was doing, ‘I was assaulted … brutally … by Patrolman
‘Maggidorf! the mayor shouted. When the plain-clothes man entered the room, the mayor yelled. ‘This girl says that Nick Woiczinsky assaulted her.’
‘Woiczinsky!’ the detective gasped. ‘He’s in Gary. Been there all day. Picking up that kid on the murder rap.’ He called for the three other policemen, who assured the mayor that Nick Woiczinsky had left that morning for Gary and wouldn’t be back for some hours.
‘Where do you think I heard the name?’ Gretchen asked with stubborn force. She turned to the lawyer, who shrugged his shoulders.
‘Best thing for you kids to do,’ the lawyer advised, ‘is to get back in your car and drive east.’ When Gretchen started to protest, he warned her, ‘Otherwise you can be arrested for bringing false charges against the police. Clearly, Patrolman Woiczinsky couldn’t have assaulted you, because he wasn’t in town today.’
When Gretchen rejected this infamous collusion, the lawyer smiled at her, undisturbed. Shrugging his shoulders, he said, ‘Lady, if these four fine officers testify that Nicholas Woiczinsky wasn’t in town today …’
When the lawyer said this, the English major stepped forward, about to speak, but Gretchen sensed what he was going to say and she stopped him. ‘I think we’d better go,’ she said quietly.
‘That’s a good girl,’ the mayor said reassuringly. ‘I’m sure you weren’t hurt, and I’m sure this can all be forgotten. These last few days … Chicago … it’s been very difficult … for all of us.’
When they were well out of town, headed east, Gretchen asked the driver, ‘You were going to say that you could identify Woiczinsky, weren’t you?’
‘I took the number of his badge,’ the driver said.
‘Good.’ She sat in silence, then repeated the word, ‘Good. When we get to Cleveland I want you to drive me to the Associated Press. Because I have taken enough.’
When the story splashed across headlines, Gretchen heard reverberations from three sources—social Boston, academic Cambridge, agonized family—and she was prepared for none of them.
In Boston, older circles were incensed, not at the Patrick Henry police, ‘who were only doing their duty,’ but at Gretchen for having paraded her indecencies in public. One woman reasoned: ‘These students have got to learn that policemen are given billyclubs and guns to enforce order, and if one persists in breaking order by protests and demonstrations, one must expect to get clubbed around a little bit.’ Another summarized Boston opinion by pointing out: ‘All sensible persons are aware that now and then women get raped, but one never runs to the newspapers. It’s an accident a family must accept in silence.’ The graver question, however, was, ‘What was a nice girl like her doing in a city like Chicago anyway?’ There were also muttered doubts as to the propriety of her having driven across country with a young man she barely knew, ‘even if he did come from Yale.’ And when both the mayor of Patrick Henry and his chief of police swore that Nicholas Woiczinsky had not been in town that day, thus proving Gretchen’s story to have been a fabrication, opinion solidified: ‘One more radical young person was caught in her own trap.’
In the Cambridge universities, reactions were quite different. Students from Harvard and MIT, along with girls from Radcliffe, were prepared to accept Gretchen’s story precisely as told; most knew friends who had undergone unsavory experiences with the police or National Guard, and when stories began appearing as to how Mayor Daley’s force had manhandled the press, who were not demonstrating, credence was lent to Gretchen’s report. Among the various faculties she became something of a heroine, with the younger professors saying, ‘You acted on behalf of the entire civilized community.’ A Harvard law professor told her, ‘Press your charges. Citizens are not obliged to accept such indignities.’ He volunteered to represent her free of charge if the case came to trial. But what alarmed her was the violence of the reactions among her liberal friends. Negroes told her, ‘Now you see what we’ve been talking about. Now you know why there has got to be gunfighting in the streets.’ An action committee from Harvard met with her and said, ‘After Chicago, there has got to be overt resistance. Buildings are going to burn.’ In her agitated condition she felt powerless to combat such threats.
It was the reaction of her parents that perplexed her most. They were, of course, outraged that their daughter had been mistreated and they defended her stubbornly; but they were also ashamed that a child of theirs had allowed herself to get into such a mess, and she caught them saying things that betrayed their suspicion that it was the police who were telling the truth. ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire’ seemed to be their attitude. And that she should have paraded her discomfiture in the Cleveland press, with stories of being stripped naked and abused by five leering men, passed their comprehension. ‘I should have thought you’d have wanted to keep it a secret,’ her mother said one afternoon, dabbing at her eyes, and when Gretchen replied that the Harvard law professor was going to support her in civil action against the city of Patrick Henry, her mother quite lost her balance.
At this point Frederick Cole showed himself to be the stalwart man I had known in our negotiations. ‘If our daughter has suffered what she says took place in that police station,’ he told the family circle, ‘we are going to defend her all the way. Not only for herself, but for all other young people who might find themselves in similar situations.’
‘You mean … fight it all over again in the headlines?’ his wife asked. ‘That would be too much. Gretchen, tell him to stop.’
In compromise, Mr. Cole asked one of the Brookline detectives to try to unravel what had really happened. He left for Patrick Henry in early October, worked two weeks and returned with disquieting news. At a conclave attended by Gretchen, her parents and the corporation lawyers, he reported: ‘I’ve checked all the records, and they seem to be quite clear. Chicago police had broadcast a valid warrant for your arrest on suspicion of assault against one of the policemen. Four Chicago witnesses identify you from photographs as the girl with the guitar who hit the policeman in the face with a brick … or a stone … or something.’
‘I didn’t have a guitar in Chicago,’ Gretchen protested.
‘The police have a photograph of you with a guitar,’ the detective said, and presented a picture which showed her carrying the guitar of the boy from Duke whose jaw had been broken.
‘But that’s not my guitar,’ she protested again, and as she spoke she looked at the faces of her family, at her family lawyers, and each was impassive, because everyone knew that Gretchen had a guitar.
‘Now as to Patrick Henry, the testimony is overwhelming—almost irrefutable, I’d say—that Patrolman Nicholas Woiczinsky was not on duty that day in Patrick Henry. Also, the mayor and the lawyer, Halliman, have given sworn depositions that when they got to the police station you were fully clothed and that nothing had happened. I got the strong feeling that if you dare to go back to Patrick Henry, you’re going to find yourself in jail, either for the proven assault in Chicago or on the charge of bringing false witness against the local police.’
‘But what about the driver of our car? He saw Woiczinsky. He saw me in the police station.’
The detective coughed and said, ‘I didn’t want to bring this up, but I have three depositions here. The first shows that the police have run a check on that young man and he has a conviction in the state of Connecticut … on what charge do you suppose? Marijuana. Now as for these next two’—and here he slipped a pair of legal papers to Gretchen—‘you may prefer keeping them to yourself. I haven’t shown them to your parents.’
Gretchen saw that the first related to the Blue-and-Gray Motel at the Breezewood Interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, whose night clerk had deposed that on the night of Thursday, August 29, Gretchen Cole of Brookline, Massachusetts, and Randolph Pepperdine of New Haven, Connecticut, had registered together. The second deposition came from the maid, one Claribelle Foster of Somerset, Pennsylvania, who swore that the two had shared the same room.
This Gretchen was tempted to do, but something within her made surrender impossible, so without thinking of the consequences, she threw the depositions before her father and cried, ‘They’re lies. We did check in at the motel together … along with other kids. They’ll testify I shared my room with two other girls.’
But as soon as she said this she saw with dismay that only one person in the room accepted her story. To the others it was incomprehensible that a college student should be right and the mayor of a city wrong. She was a young person, mixed up with strange philosophies and stranger people, and nothing that was charged against her was improbable. In a kind of dumb fury she looked from one stern face to the next, realizing that in them she was seeing the jury that would listen to her case in Patrick Henry, and the dreadful futility of her position bore down upon her. The very people who should have been defending her had become her accusers.
For the first time her father spoke. He was the one who believed. ‘I spent the last week checking up on the four young people who shared that car with you, and I’m convinced that what you say is true.’ Gretchen looked at him with the compassionate love that a young woman can sometimes feel for her father when she suddenly sees him as a man who has had to fight against the world, and she waited for him to tell the family lawyers to proceed, but instead she heard him say, ‘But there’s absolutely nothing we can do. With their fabric of interlocking lies, they’ve got us boxed in.’
‘What do you mean?’ she cried.
‘That there are times when a conspiracy makes the individual helpless.’
‘Now wait a minute, Mr. Cole!’ the detective protested. ‘If you think that I’m so dumb I can’t spot a conspiracy …’