James Ellroy
This Storm
TO HELEN KNODE
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
Reminiscenza.
I remain spellbound. That then-to-now fever still consumes me. I am very old and the sole living witness. The Maestro willed me his piano and the score we smuggled from Russia. I retain faultless vision and memory. Long bouts of practice keep my hands strong.
I compose at the keyboard. Improvisation spawns recollection. Words and music sustain me and forge my repudiation of death.
The war.
The rain.
The gold.
Los Angeles and Mexico, the Fifth Column.
I will not die as long as I live this story.
Good evening and bienvenidos, a belated Feliz Navidad, and let’s not forget próspero año y felicidad — which means “Happy New Year” in English and serves to introduce the Mexico-at-war theme of tonight’s broadcast. And at war we are, my fellow American listeners — even though we sure as shooting didn’t want to be in the first place.
Let’s talk turkey here. Es la verdad, as our Mex cousins say. We’ve been in this Jew-inspired boondoggle a mere twenty-three days, and we’ve been forced to stand with the rape-happy Russian Reds against the more sincerely simpatico Nazis. That’s a shattering shame, but our Jew-pawn president, Franklin “Double-Cross” Rosenfeld, has deliriously decreed that we must fight der Führer, so fight that heroic jefe we regretfully must. It’s a ways off, though — because we’ve got our hands full with the Japs right now.
So, let’s meander down Mexico way — where the señoritas sizzle and more HELL-bent jefes hold sway.
Mexico connotes “PROUDLY CATHOLIC,” does it not, friends? Add THEOCRATIC REPUBLIC, ANTI-RED, and DUTIFULLY RELIGIOUS to that. It paints a picture, doesn’t it? Yes — but the picture is wholly inaccurate and sorrowfully seditious, dating back to the tempestuous ’20s and the repugnant Red reign of Presidente Plutarco Calles.
Item: Calles instituted a Six-Year Plan for social and political reform, patterned after Red Russia’s Five-Year Plan.
Item: Calles set out to eradicate the influence of the Catholic Church, barred religious festivals and processions, and created “workers’ collectives” to counter the alleged excesses of industrial capitalism and further secularize the Mexican body politic, despite the stubborn opposition of the CATHOLIC Mexican people.
Item: Catholic bishops were forced to suspend public worship.
Item: Calles’s “Redshirt” goon squads shuttered churches across Mexico.
Item: priests were murdered, nuns were raped, bishops sought South American asylum, and the Holy Mass was performed as a secret sacrament.
Item: cancerous Calles was succeeded by limp leftist Lázaro Cárdenas. He was a motley mollycoddler of a less malicious sort. His anticlerical policies bore a still Stalinist, but less overt stink. Priests were still murdered, nuns were still raped, provincial despots still shuttered churches and satanically forbade Mass.
Item: these practices continue under current Presidente Manuel Ávila Camacho — a purported “leftist-centrist” — read that as one mealymouthed muchacho.
This brings us to the Cristeros — the ripsnorting, righteous, CATHOLIC resistance.
The Goldshirts — not the Redshirts of the Calles/Cárdenas/Communist ilk. The armed home guard that fought fire with fire, killed Redshirts, lynched Communist commissars and apoplectic apparatchiks, and burned more than a few Red reptiles alive.
The Cristeros flourished under Calles and were forced into hiding under Cárdenas. In ’37 they majestically metamorphosed into the Unión Nacional Sinarquista.
Synarchism means “without anarchy.” Sinarquismo represents a full-fledged assault on the anti-Catholic Left. Underground Üntermenschen now enforce Presidente Camacho’s atheistic agenda; the Sinarquistas magnificently mount a Catholic counterattack. The Sinarquistas are growing in number. They proselytize for a merged Catholic-secular state. They’ve been called fascistas and Nazis — but that’s all Red hoo-ha. Yes, but they surely grew out of the Spanish Falange and Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s valiant victory in the Spanish Civil War. And, now — with the United States embroiled in a consuming world conflict, and with Mexico situated at our southernmost tip — will the Greenshirt Sinarquistas serve our best interests as the emergent world power both anti-Axis and nationalistically non-Red?
Item: Mexico has remained “neutral” in this world conflict so far.
Item: Presidente Camacho closed the German consulate in August ’41 but has let a great many pro-Axis Krauts and Japs linger down May-hee-co way.
Enter Baja California.
Baja’s that lurid lick of Mexican land south of our own San Diego. It’s a hellish hotbed of fascist-comunista intrigue. There’s a great many resident Japs. The Mex State Police suspect the presence of a great many Jap submarine berths along Baja’s Pacific coastline. There’s talk of secret Jap air bases being readied for raids on U.S. naval installations and defense plants near Los Angeles.
Enter Sinarquista boss man Salvador Abascal.
Señor Abascal es muy católico. He’s the Sinarquista’s spiritual and intellectual leader, and wears Sinarquismo’s Greenshirt proudly. Like most male adherents to Sinarquismo, he wears a small “SQ” with a coiled snake encircling it, tattooed in the web of his right forefinger and thumb. He’s a handsome man of thirty-one — and Presidente Camacho seems to fear him.
Item: the Sinarquista membership is growing in Mexico and the U.S.
Item: punk patriarch Camacho has granted them land for an encampment at Magdalena Bay in Southern Baja. Is he isolating the Sinarquistas or readying them for some task?
U.S. Army Intelligence officers are mobilizing in Baja. They will sort out the political gestalt and round up Japs, in a replication of our own Jap-internment efforts. What’s the upshot here? Will Mexico end its neutered neutral stance and throw in with Uncle Sam? America is now alarmingly aligned with the repugnant Russian Reds, and allied against the nifty but nefarious Nazis. Will the Mexican peso and the U.S. dollar plummet and will a new gold standard arise? What about those ripe rumors — Nazis and Russkies melting gold bars into swastika and hammer-and-sickle artifacts?
Mexico, my American hermanos and Christian countrymen. It’s the southern gateway to our cherished shores. Will waterlogged wetbacks breach our borders and sap us with sabotage? Will the Sinarquistas come to our aid as a heroic home guard?
Part One
Rain
(December 31, 1941–January 23, 1942)
1
Elmer Jackson
(Los Angeles, 9:30 P.M., 12/31/41)
Stakeout.