1Chapter Five

The first thing Harding noticed was the light. Between the floodlights erected by the police and those in use by the dozen or so television crews, Michigan Avenue was almost as bright as Comiskey Park on game night. The intersection of Michigan and Balbo had been swept relatively clear of protesters, although a straggler or two dashed across every minute or so, often only a step or two ahead of retribution. In the blocks to the north and south the battle raged on, here there was an eerie calm.

He grabbed an officer who was in half-hearted pursuit of a bedraggled hippie. "Hey! I'm looking for a kid!"

"Yeah, right!"

"A little kid! Four years old, wearing blue. She's got separated from her mama, somewhere near here."

The officer shook his head. "Whaddaya think this is, "Romper Room"? We ain't got no little kids out here!"

The next five men he asked gave him the same answer. Nobody had seen a four-year-old girl on Michigan Avenue in the middle of the riot. The sixth, however, was helpful. No, he hadn't seen a little girl, but he had heard one, wailing away among the spectators who lined the sidewalk outside the Conrad Hilton. He pointed out the southwest corner of the intersection with his nightstick, then dashed off in pursuit of another straggler.

Harding caught a whiff of tear gas. The wind was shifting again.

The Conrad Hilton was one of Chicago's finest hotels. It occupied the entire block between Michigan and Wabash, from Balbo south to--Harding tried to remember his map of downtown Chicago--down to whatever was the next street after Balbo. After the convention center itself, the Conrad Hilton had to have been the Yippies' favorite target, as it was home to the man who, despite all their efforts and wishes to the contrary, was at this very moment being nominated to carry the Democratic standard in 1968.

So here was a detachment of at least a hundred cops, augmented by another fifty National Guardsmen, protecting a cushion of safe space around the hotel's mid-block main entrance with a barricade of sawhorses. Between the barricade and the corner of Balbo a crowd of civilians was watching the riot from the sidewalk outside the famous Haymarket Lounge. Inside the Haymarket the Hilton's guests were dining on steak and lobster while gawking through the huge plate-glass picture window at the chaos beyond.

The crowd on the sidewalk was growing rapidly, as the protesters who were fleeing from the cops found refuge among the spectators. At its widest, near the corner of Balbo, the crowd was packed in almost twenty deep from the building out into the street. As Harding watched, a blue-helmeted officer pursued a particular miscreant into that crowd, shoving bystanders out of the way in order to make an arrest. At the moment the cop grabbed the protester's collar, several dozen of the civilians nearby were toppled over in the melee, and Harding heard a piercingly high scream.

He reversed his nightstick, laying most of its length along his forearm with only a few inches of handle extending beyond his fingers. He charged into the crowd, following the sound of the child's cries, using his own formidable bulk to plow a path; he prodded the handle of the nightstick into the ribs of unyielding individuals to help move them out of his way. As his fellow officer dragged the protester away, the crowd was able to shift into the space thus opened, and Harding worked his way to the brick wall of the Haymarket Lounge in short order.

She was huddled on the sidewalk at the foot of the wall, a tiny blue bundle with her head between her knees and her hands clasped together over her head. Harding wondered at the marvel; nothing but raw animal instinct could have told her to protect her head, face and belly that way. Her baby-blue dress and tights were torn and dirty from her ordeal. He crouched down beside her, forming a protective barrier between her and the crushing crowd, then brushed his hand across her brown curls. "Maria?"

At the sound of her name, she opened up with an even louder wailing cry. Harding took that as confirmation, and plucked her up off the sidewalk and stood up with her in his arms. He cradled her head against his broad shoulder, and crooned in her ear, "Sshhhh. Maria, Maria, you're going to be fine, just fine. Your Mama asked me to find you. She loves you and she's waiting for you.

Okay?"

She continued to sob for a while, but her energy was no longer in it. Dirty tears still rolled across her cheeks, perhaps as much from the lingering effects of the tear gas as from fear; her panicked hyperventilation slowed into dainty hiccups. Not sure what else to say to such a young child, Harding gave what he hoped was a reassuring smile.

She reached tentatively and touched one finger to his star, counting the points as though she were reciting a lesson, "One (hic!), two, three, four (hic!), five." Perhaps her mother had been wise enough to teach her what the symbol meant--that the star-shaped badge would be worn by a grownup she should trust--or maybe her attention was simply captured by the simple shape and shiny surface. In any case, Harding was relieved that he would not need to deal with the childish screams in his ear as he carried her to safety.

He turned away from the building and managed to force his way a few yards from the building, each step forward more difficult than the last; he realized with dread that the apparent size of the crowd had almost doubled since he first pushed his way in. A quick glance to the north told him why--the National Guardsmen at the foot of Balbo Street were now using their sawhorses to push the northern edge of the crowd southward, in a strange mirror image of the barricade at the hotel entrance that was pushing the southern edge of the crowd northward. Pressed from both sides, the people on the edge of the throng were being squeezed outward onto Michigan Avenue, where dozens of enraged cops were using their nightsticks to drive them back toward the sidewalk. Harding watched incredulously as one of those officers calmly pulled out his canister of Mace and squirted a stream of the caustic liquid into the crowd as he walked along the perimeter.

"I gotta get this little girl out to her mother!" he shouted, to no avail. The people around him glanced at him with looks of sympathy, of embarrassment, of discomfort. They were all being held immobile by the crush of bodies, and Harding and his precious burden were trapped with them.

"Officer!"

He scanned the faces in the crowd. "Who said that?"

"Officer! Over here!" A hand had emerged from the sea of faces, just a yard or so away to his left. It belonged to a young man who, like Harding, was tall enough to see over the heads of most of the people around him.

"Whaddaya want?"

"Where's the girl's mother?"

"What?"

"Where is she? The girl's mother!"

Harding realized with a start what the young man was thinking. He was only a yard away, but it was a yard closer to the edge of the crowd, a yard closer to the frantic woman in the yellow dress on Balbo Street. "The mother's on Balbo! Can you get out?"

The young man shook his head. "No, I don't think so. But my friend's a yard or so away, in the right direction." He twisted around and called over his shoulder, "Mike? Can you move at all?"

Harding could just make out Mike's response. "Not very much, Dan."

"But you can move?"

"Yeah, a little."

The young man--Dan, apparently--turned back to Harding. "We can do this, Officer. She's so little--I think we can get her out of here."

Harding listened to this exchange with half his attention; the other half of his mind was gravely considering the possibility of handing Maria over to this stranger. He wondered what Dan was doing on Michigan Avenue tonight, whether he was a curious onlooker or whether he was one of the Yippie protesters driven into the crowd by the police. Dan seemed respectable enough, clean-shaven with blond hair just long enough in back to brush the collar of his green t-shirt. He looked down at the little girl in his arms; she gazed up at him in wordless trust, and hiccuped.

A wave of pressure swept through the crowd from the south. Several of the people to Harding's right were toppled by the motion, and even more would have fallen had they not been stuck like corks. Harding dropped to one knee and held Maria tightly to his chest. When the crowd motion stabilized around him, he fought his way to his feet again--no easy task, the bodies were packed in even tighter now--and relocated Dan.

"Hey, Dan!"

"Yes, Officer?"

"Ask your friend if he can see the mother."

"What's she look like?"

Harding paused and realized with puzzlement that he had already made his decision. "She's about five two, a hundred, maybe a hundred ten pounds, long brown hair in two braids. She's wearing a yellow sundress." He listened as Dan repeated the description over his shoulder, then relaxed in triumphant hope when he heard Mike's reply.

"I see her!"

"What's her name?" asked Dan.

"The little girl's name is Maria. The mother's name--I don't know."

That didn't stop Mike. He was already yelling as loud as he could manage, "Hey! Mama! MARIA'S MAMA!"

Harding shifted Maria's weight to his left arm, and handed her his nightstick. "Hold this for a minute, okay?" She nodded solemnly, and took the stick in her chubby hands. Harding unsnapped the chin strap of his blue helmet and pulled it off with his free hand; his hair was soaking wet and plastered to his scalp. He put the helmet on Maria's head and shortened the strap as far as it would go--which was not far enough, of course. The sight of the huge helmet on her tiny head was comical, but the purpose was deadly serious. He took the nightstick back from her, and shifted his hold to her waist. "Can you hold on to that silly hat for me, Maria?"

She laughed. "It's too big."

"Yeah, well I have a big head. But I want you to wear it, because it's blue like your dress, and 'cause it'll bring you good luck. Okay?"

"Okay."

"You'll hold on tight?"

She reached up and grabbed on tight to the helmet. "I'll hold on tight."

"That's a good girl." He lifted her up. "Dan?"

Dan reached out, and Harding tried to pass her to his outstretched hands. He couldn't quite make it, no matter how much they both strained, and as he struggled to reach just a few inches more he felt his grip on the little girl's waist start to slip. For a sickening moment he thought that she was headed for the pavement, but in that instant three more pairs of hands appeared, bearing Maria up and carrying her effortlessly across to Dan's arms.

"Got her!" Dan cried.

"Amen!" rang out a woman's voice from Harding's left. He looked down at her, and shared in her smile of triumph, her hands still held high over her head in victory. He then looked up to see Dan passing Maria into the crowd, a forest of upraised hands floating her away from danger. Then he lost sight of her as he was swept backwards two steps by another shift in the press of bodies.

When he recovered his stance he looked around and re-evaluated the situation. The police were continuing to attack the people on the edges of the crowd, on both Michigan and Balbo, herding them closer and closer to one another and to the unyielding wall and plate-glass window of the Haymarket Lounge. There was no sign of the little Maria in her blue dress and matching helmet; he prayed that she had found her way safely back to her mother on Balbo Street.

Another shove in the hip, another elbow in the kidney, and Harding took another involuntary step toward the Haymarket. This time it took several moments off-balance with his left hand on a total stranger's shoulder before he realized that he simply couldn't move his other foot well enough to completely recover his balance. He stood there on one foot, helpless, held upright by the press of the bodies around him.

Through the Haymarket's plate-glass picture window he could see startled customers staring out with morbid curiosity at the press of bodies growing tighter and tighter. The glass seemed to quiver, distorting the images beyond, and the well-dressed diners began to abandon their meals and retreat as the huge window bowed and flexed under the strain.

The moment when window shattered seemed to stretch into several minutes. The glass first frosted over with a crazy-pattern of cracks, then seemed to hang in place in defiance of gravity as the first row of people toppled through into the restaurant. Then the broken pieces slid earthward still in their vertical plane, slicing and splintering as they cascaded over the people in the way. Harding watched, transfixed, as the crowd realized that the restaurant had just become an escape-route. The people who had been crushed against the building now rushed into the Haymarket by the dozens, knocking over tables and patrons as they were swept along by the stampede of bodies behind them.

For several long seconds he waited for the pressure-release to move through the crowd outward from the building, but when it reached him he was thrown forward onto his hands and knees before he could regain his balance. Pain flashed through his palms when they struck the pavement; he lost hold of his nightstick and it rolled a few feet down the sidewalk, just out of reach. He scrambled forward among the pandemonium of running feet, reaching forward with his numb fingers to regain it, when a sturdy work boot came down with bone-crushing force on the back of his right hand as its owner rushed by.

Harding gasped in pain and toppled helplessly onto his side, cradling the injured hand against his chest, tears in his eyes. "Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. . . . " He bit his lower lip until it bled, and forced himself to climb slowly back onto his knees, using only his left hand for support. The one time that he allowed the fingertips of his right hand to brush the ground, fiery pain shot up the length of his arm and he swayed with dizziness. His first priority was to recover his dropped nightstick, but as he groped around on the ground among the flash of running feet, he could not find it.

CRACK! Pain exploded across the back of his head. He crashed face-first to the concrete, his vision plunged into darkness punctuated by a million sparks of light. As consciousness faded, he noticed for the first time the angry chant of the defiant crowd.

"The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!"

oooooo0oooooo

CRACK!

The sound of the first volley awoke Harding with a start. Even though he had known that it was coming, the noise and the shock wave had caught him unprepared. A few yards away the seven Army riflemen raised their weapons to the sky and fired the second volley.

CRACK!

A chill wind whipped across the riverside plain at Arlington National Cemetery on this Friday afternoon, late November 1999. The small group of mourners stood in a tight knot beside the flag-draped casket, as if huddled together for warmth. At the center of the group, seated on two chairs, were the grieving sons, Harding and Wilson. Harding and several of the other mourners were wearing the black dress uniform and distinctive checkerboard-banded cap of the Chicago Police Department; Wilson wore his tan-colored uniform, brown jacket and Stetson as Sheriff of Willison.

A simple white marker was already in place at the head of the open grave; on the back of it was the name of the dead man's wife, who had been interred there many years earlier:

Leonora J. Welsh

wife of Sgt. A. C. Welsh

May 17, 1915

October 14, 1979

CRACK!

With the last seven of the twenty-one shots echoing from the hills of Arlington, the honor guard stepped forward to remove and fold the flag while a bugler played "Taps." The slow, melancholy notes of the song allowed Harding a measure of peace, and a chance to isolate his thoughts away from his father's funeral.