Rex Stout by The President Vanishes Page A

telephone, made no answer.
    The police were still in control. The army, uniformed, trucks, gas-bombs and guns handy, was ready at its base, but it was not yet active. The question was still open. The first clash had taken place shortly after dawn, when a group of Communists five hundred strong, out near the Marine Barracks,had started marching west up Virginia Avenue, and a police captain who had read about Napoleon had disregarded the general orders and had decided that the Reds should wait a while. A few had been hurt, the Communists’ orderly march had been turned into a stampede, and the captain had been dressed down. Later, from the top of a building near Garfield Park, bricks and stones had begun to fall on the same Reds; a few had tried throwing them back again, but their leaders urged them out of range and they went, leaving a few comrades in a truck bound for a hospital. Police mounting to the roofs caught three men in gray shirts, all that remained in sight.
    Throughout the early morning there were minor skirmishes here and there, mostly southeast, some north of the Union Depot. After an affair on Second Street from which everyone had scattered before the arrival of the police, a Gray Shirt was found stretched on the pavement with the side of his head smashed in like a dropped flower-pot. That was the only fatality reported; they were not really killing yet, only rehearsing for it. All details were being relayed from police headquarters to the office of the Secretary of War, against the moment when the army might have to step in.
    When the Secretary turned away from the telephone Major General Cunningham asked him, “Well, what does our good-hearted President say?”
    “It’s up to me.” The Secretary rubbed his ear. “Funny. I’m to decide if and when it’s necessary. I didn’t get the President, but Brownell said that’s final. He’s sending it over in writing.”
    “Well?”
    The Secretary shook his head. “Wait till we hear again from Tanner.”
    Tanner, Chief of Police, in his own office, not so private, was beset. He hated trouble. Burglaries and traffic violations and even an occasional murder were not trouble; they were affairs of business and to be expected; but the Communists and Gray Shirts and that kind, while their activities seemed to him plainly criminal and that was that, had roots that sneaked underground into so many pockets of political subsoil that it was necessary to treat them almost as if they possessed the rights of ordinary citizens. That was confusing and certainly made trouble. And they weren’t the only ones. He had just hung up the telephone receiver after talking to a lieutenantwho had reported that at the corner of Fourteenth Street and New York Avenue a bunch of women, a hundred or more, were demanding permission to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. They were members of the Women’s League for Peace, the lieutenant said; well-dressed, determined, and carrying anti-war banners as big as bedsheets. When the Chief of Police had instructed the lieutenant to tell them to go home, and the lieutenant had replied that it would take a squad to handle them, the Chief had yelled into the transmitter, “All right, let the damn fools march!”
    A similar request which arrived around eleven o’clock was too much for him; he told the captain who phoned it in to call up the Secretary of War and report it direct. At the War Office the call was put through to the Secretary himself. Cunningham was still there. The Secretary listened to the captain on the phone, asked a question or two, and then said, “Hold the wire.” He turned to the general: “Here’s a tale for you. Three hundred Grey Shirts are in an alley down by Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania. Their leader says they’re going to march to the Capitol. The police captain says they’re not. And how do you like this, the leader shows him a permit signed by Commissioner Forrest!”
    Cunningham’s eyes opened.