“Didn’t you hear me, boy?” the clerk asked. “You can’t stay here. You’ll have to get out before I call the police.”
The clerk looked at him expressionlessly, but Ginter could sense the hatred behind the veneer. Time stood still.
“I, I have money,” Ginter stammered, knowing even as he spoke the pointlessness of the words. He started to reach for his wallet.
The clerk leaned forward and raised his voice. “Nigger boy, are you deaf and stupid? I said no colored here. This is not a colored motel. You gotta’ go down the road. You best get along before you be seen here. Now get out of here.”
Without thinking Ginter blurted out, “I’m with her.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth he realized his mistake. The clerk’s eyes moved from Ginter to Pamela before narrowing with fury.
“What he means is, he’s my driver,” Pamela said quickly. She looked at the clerk and cocked her head toward Ginter.
“Or actually, my husband’s driver,” she continued. “You know how it is. My husband didn’t want me to come all the way down to visit my cousin in South Carolina by myself. And I wanted to take my car so he said he’d get by with no driver and Lewis here could drive me.”
She leaned up against the counter and whispered to the clerk. “It’s not that I don’t trust him with my car or anything but I want to get going early in the morning and”—she tilted her head sideways toward Ginter—“you know how they can be by themselves in some hotel.” She winked at the clerk.
The clerk appeared uncertain. “I don’t care. He still can’t stay here. You can stay here, ma’am, but he’s gotta’ go to the colored motel. He’ll have to pick you up in the morning.”
“Well, O.K.” Pamela pouted. “But would you happen to know how much the colored motel costs because I don’t want to give him too much money. You know,” she added conspiratorially.
“I have no idea,” the clerk said icily.
Pamela pulled her purse back out and handed Lewis a ten dollar bill.
“Now take this, Lewis, and pick me up at 10:00 tomorrow morning sharp. And don’t be late! And Lewis,” she added as she turned to go with her suitcase, “I want to see a receipt and some change.”
Pamela exited the motel at exactly 10:00 and walked to the waiting Corvette. The engine was running and the car was facing the exit. She had barely closed the door when Ginter slammed the car into first gear and popped the clutch, chirping the rear tires on the gravel before pulling out onto the paved road and heading south.
They rode in silence with no radio on for almost half an hour before Lewis said simply, “Thank you.”
Pamela snickered. “Remember that old movie, Driving Miss Daisy? That’s where I got it from.”
“You thought fast. Coming up with that story.”
Pamela nodded. “Part of my training.”
“In the Resistance?” Ginter asked.
She shook her head. “Insurance adjusting,” she said.
Ginter exhaled deeply. “Back in ‘04 during the Balkans War we were outside of a Greek town called Porti. It’s in the mountains. It was all hilly to the west and there’s a wooded plain to the east. There was a mobile Russkie command post directing artillery that had been clobbering us. We had tried to get a bead on the radio transmissions but they were keeping them real brief and this guy kept moving around.”
Ginter guided the Corvette out and around a tractor-trailer truck before continuing.
“We had a plan called ‘one, two, three zap.’ Basically, I take a squad and circle around to the west and enter the town just after dawn. It would look like we had arrived late because of the hills rather than attacking at night, as they would have expected. The subterfuge only has to last a few minutes and we figured they’d counter-attack the probe. Then we’d attack with a full platoon from the east so the Russkies would think that the west was a feint. At that point, their command would take full control of the defense and should start ordering a full redeployment to defend the real attack from the east. And in that momentary flurry of redirection orders we had a ‘copter loaded to lock on to the surge in radio traffic and track a missile into the transmission point and, hopefully, take out the whole C and C.”
Ginter took a deep breath. He kept his eyes on the road. Pamela remained turned toward him, saying nothing.
“Anyway, that was the plan,” Ginter continued. “I came in with a squad on time and there was no perimeter guard. Nothing. We crept into town and I saw a courtyard with a dinky antenna in the window of a building behind a stone wall. There was no gate but we scoped it and still didn’t see anything so I went over the wall. Still nothing. Then through these French doors I see the whole fucking Russkie Command Center including a fat General with his feet up on a desk talking on a regular phone. I figure there have to be guards up the yin-yang. I figure I’m about to die in a hale of bullets. But no one looked up. There was no time to get anyone else without alerting every Russian. I didn’t even have a grenade on me, just my M-16.”
Ginter was gripping the steering wheel hard and sweat beaded on his forehead. He wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“There was no time, and nowhere else to go. I kicked open the doors. It looked like it had been a café. The general turned and started to say something and I lowered the M-16 and put one in his mouth and then I sprayed the room. Three guys burst open a door from a balcony and I sprayed them too. In less than a minute it was all over and there was no need for the ‘copter. I called in my guys and we blew up the room and that was it.”
Ginter took a deep breath. “For maybe 45 seconds of hosing down a room I got a medal from the Greek government. We counted eight dead Russian soldiers. And in those 45 seconds I wasn’t scared. Not one bit. Didn’t shake afterwards. Crazy and adrenaline rushed all over the place, but not scared. Just blew the room and left.”
Ginter swerved back into the right lane, slowed the Corvette, and swiveled to look at Pamela. “Last night was different,” he said. “Last night I was damn scared.”
Chapter 18
On Friday morning, August 9, 1963 Lewis Ginter sat in his car outside the New Orleans train station. In the 84 hours since the Virginia motel incident, whenever he and Pamela were hungry, Ginter remained in the car and dispatched Pamela on a run of shops for sandwiches, chips and sodas. Bathroom breaks had been harder. Ginter had flinched when he first saw a “Colored” restroom, while Pamela had confidently strode past into the one marked, “Whites Only.”
Buying the Corvette had been rash. Registering it with New Hampshire license plates before driving into the South compounded the error. Although he had not yet been stopped by the police for being black-in-a-Corvette, he chastised himself for his lack of forethought. He compensated by only driving at night, or by having Pamela drive while he remained slouched in the passenger seat. He had resolved that if stopped and threatened with arrest he would shoot his way out of it. But that determination had not been comforting. Shooting a white police officer would have left him on the wrong end of a manhunt.
Ginter wondered if traversing back in time had eroded his intellectual or cognitive ability.
“It’s all screwed up,” he kept telling himself. “That’s all it is. Everything is messed up and you’re just not thinking clearly.” He resolved to dump the Corvette.
Across the street, a black shoeshine boy stood outside the terminal. The kid looked about 14 and Ginter mentally calculated that by 2026 he would be about 77. He wondered if he would still be alive, an African-American elder living in New Orleans. He toyed with the idea that when he got back to Cambridge he would travel to New Orleans and find the man, until he remembered that Hurricane Katrina had displaced most of the city’s black population.