"Perps? Ah, demonstrators. How many?"
"Seventeen here."
Here was the morgue.
"Inside?"
"I am not sure. Many. Almost forty, maybe. There were others who could still run, and did."
Pam, Ron, and Missy came out onto the sidewalk in front of Pam's apartment when they heard a shot. Followed by lots of shots.
The gunfire wasn't really close, so they stood there, listening.
"Over toward the hospital," Ron said.
"I think I can guess why we're low priority for the police," Pam answered. "Should we grab our guns and head over there?"
"The dispatcher didn't sound flustered or say anything about getting the reserves out when we talked to her," Ron answered. "We'd probably be more in the way than anything else. Let's concentrate on writing up every single thing that happened to you girls this morning, in order. So you'll have it when they do get around to talking to you."
"Including that we were planning to sneak into Veda Mae's garage?"
"I think we can leave that out," Ron said. "We can tell that to Cory Joe, for Don Francisco, but as far as Preston Richards and the Grantville police force are concerned, let's start with Pam walking down the street and seeing the guys unloading the signs out of Veda Mae's garage."
Pam was about half way through her part of the narrative when she stopped writing. "Do you know what we forgot to do while we where there?"
"What?"
"We forgot to look in the extra garbage cans. They're why we went in the first place."
"Well, we can't very well go back now. There are people swarming all over the place because of that shooting over by the hospital."
"Maybe we can try again next Sunday morning."
Ron and Missy looked at her. "Pam," Ron said, "by next Sunday, whatever was there is likely to be long gone."
"Then maybe we should go back now."
This time the other two looked at one another with the mutual unspoken feeling that Pam was maybe getting a little over-involved in this project.
"I don't think so," Missy said.
Chapter 47
Grantville
March 4, 1635
The batch of genuine anti-Jewish fanatics whom Gui Ancelin and the Frankfurt anti-Semites had garnered from more than a dozen towns in the SoTF, mostly from Franconia, headed for the synagogue under the leadership of Fortunat Deneau. The action started as he had designed it, with a few people standing around a man who was giving a harangue on the pattern of those that the agitators had been giving in other towns throughout the SoTF in recent weeks. Harangues which the SoTF administration did not like but which it had to tolerate under its own free speech laws. The small group would then attract a few more spectators, gradually growing in size. The only thing that might make it conspicuous would be that all the spectators were male, but Deneau regarded that as unavoidable. Women in such crowds were ordinarily drawn from the town where the riot was to occur, but the public opinion in Grantville was such that if there were local anti-Semites, they did not ordinarily proclaim their opinions openly.
This harangue, unlike the ones that had been delivered in other towns, drew the attention of Henry Dreeson and Enoch Wiley, who were standing and talking outside of the Presbyterian church after the end of the eleven o'clock service. The service had run late because of communion . Enoch never saw any reason to abbreviate his sermon on communion Sundays.
As quickly as possible—which was no longer very quickly, in Henry's case—they walked over to stand in front of the synagogue door. As the harangue continued, both of them spoke to the gathering crowd. Henry, basically, tried reasoning. Wiley preached the seventeenth century Presbyterian line, in no way variant from his own twentieth century beliefs, that predestination was all and that if God wanted the Jews to convert, they would. Since they had not done so, this constituted evidence that they still had a part to play in the Divine Plan.
Deneau had not prepared for this development, having had no way to anticipate it. As he tried to think how best to proceed next, Léon Boucher showed up with a message from Dumais. The Grantville police force was now fully occupied at the hospital.
That was his signal. They would have to proceed. He sent in the remainder of the actual anti-Jewish fanatics, the ones Weitz had brought from Frankfurt am Main and other cities of the Rhine and Main rivers. A substantial number of them were veterans of prior anti-Jewish riots. He reinforced them with those from the nearby Thuringian towns who had been standing around as "spectators" up to that point. These larger numbers coalesced around the haranguer. Meininger, his name was, from Schleusingen.