Chapter Two Thousand One Hundred Eighty
17th September 1972
Tempelhof, Berlin
There were some lessons that schools couldn’t teach. Kat thought of this as she watched Sophie and Ziska play with Sprocket down in the garden from her office window. It was something that Kiki had wasted a lot of breath over the years when it came to her girls. Kat understood that she was projecting many of her own issues onto the girls under her care. She had certainly talked Peter Holz enough about that over the years. The reality was that actions had consequences, especially for young women and the world was not a very forgiving place.
For Sophie to get herself in over her head with a puppy was a relatively harmless way to learn that lesson, far better than have that happen in a few years when the stakes were far higher. Of course, she had issues of her own. For the first eight years of her life, anything she had could be taken away with even the thinnest of pretext. Even now, Sophie tended to look with suspicion at anything that was just given to her. She had exhausted her personal resources before she had asked Kat for help, with great reluctance. Sophie had thought that Kat was going to take the puppy away from her, as if Kat, Petia, and Darya had not been keeping a close eye on things and making sure that she properly cared for Sprocket. Kat figured that she would need to find a way to get Sophie to accept the money reimbursing her for the expenses she had incurred. After all, it was obvious that Sprocket had found a home.
Kat had also learned that Sophie had been saving up for a new bicycle because that was the genesis of Sprocket’s name. That had resulted in a further discussion about what exactly she had been looking at. In this case, a type of bicycle that was a sleek design and was clearly not intended for girls. Kat understood the concept. Decades earlier bicycles had been designed for women because in England they would need to ride while wearing what was deemed acceptable attire. That continued to echo worldwide in what had become a cultural artifact. The sort that Kat had encountered often and understood the need to bull through at times.
That had left the question of just how Sophie had planned to make such a large purchase? Especially after she had already made one in the form of Sprocket. Kat had a feeling that she wasn’t going to like the answer one bit because while it was the sort of thing that she had encouraged, the resulting actions were not.
Los Angeles, California
Ritchie saw the newspaper as he walked into the Convenience Store. They had stopped off to get something to drink after a long Saturday night in Skid Row having drawn the short straw this week. There had been a killing of the sort that was typically deemed to be Community Service and Robbery/Homicide had gone through the motions of starting an investigation. The odds were high that it would go cold unless the suspect fell into RHD’s hands. Of course, the odds of that happening were far higher than you would think. As Ritchie looked over the bottles of fruit juice in the cooler, Mike stopped to read the paper.
If the Sunday Morning edition of the Los Angeles Times had this story, then it was going to be a massive national story by that evening. Big Mike looked at the headlines with a snort. He had told Ritchie many times what he thought of politicians, particularly those in Parker Center. Still, it was looking like the Republican Party’s 1972 Presidential Candidate was crooked as a barrel of snakes.
“Governor Agnew implicated in Maryland Kickback Scandal” Mike read the headline aloud, “Get this, Tricky Dick is quoted as saying, America deserves far better than having a President who is a crook.”
“Then this is a good week to be Nixon” Ritchie replied with a shrug. Last week, as the debate over the whether or not to have debates in October had heated up, Nixon had not looked as great. Because he was currently ahead in the race, Nixon had clearly stated he wasn’t interested. The public had not liked that, and Agnew had basically called Nixon a coward on national television. Then this latest story had dropped. As far as Ritchie was concerned, most of what the President did was Foreign Policy and he had seen firsthand what looked like in places like China and South America, under a few different Administrations. When it came Presidential Politics, Ritchie always thought about which candidate was least likely to get him killed. Between Nixon and Agnew, it was sort of a wash.
“You have an opinion about this?” Mike asked the Clerk behind the counter. The man didn’t reply, instead he just gave Mike a disinterested look. Ritchie knew the type. The Clerk had seen and heard nearly everything while working this job. He just sold the newspapers and couldn’t care less about what was in them.
That was when one of the neighborhood’s skells entered the store, took one look at Ritchie and Mike’s uniforms, turned on his heel and left. Mike saw that and chuckled, the Clerk looked annoyed. Ritchie had no idea what the subtext of this situation was, but he had a feeling that the mere presence of them in the store must have interrupted whatever side hustle the Clerk had going.