Historical Fiction written by Bryan Stalder

Kansas City, Summer 1933

The morning air was already heavy with the scent of coal smoke and river damp as Matthew Orr stepped off the streetcar. He had caught the line near his quaint bungalow on Van Brunt Boulevard, a home that felt solid and honest compared to the frantic energy of the city’s core. As the streetcar rattled away, the sparks from the overhead wires hissed in the early light—a sharp, electric sound that always reminded him of the unpredictable energy of Kansas City.

It was just after 7:00 a.m. The sun, up since before five, was already baking the pavement surrounding the train depot. As Matthew walked toward the grand, colonnaded entrance of Union Station, he passed a newsboy, shouting about the previous night’s baseball scores, and a pair of pigeons fighting over a discarded bit of pastry near a baggage cart. He walked past a black Plymouth parked near the curb. A man sat behind the wheel, his profile framed by the window. He was a handsome fellow with strikingly red hair and blue eyes that stared forward with an unsettling, sober discipline. A thin, jagged scar traced the left side of his head. Matthew lingered on him briefly because he had seen enough men in doorways and dark cars during the Black and Tan War in Ireland to know when a man was waiting for blood. Now in the U.S., Orr was an immigrant who had traded the terror of the Irish War of Independence for the relative peace of the American Midwest, and his Protestant faith anchored him in a quiet reverence for the sanctity of life.

Inside, the Great Hall was a cathedral of marble and transit. Matthew stood beneath the massive chandeliers, feeling small but secure. He was there for Jessie. His wife, Jessie Elvira Tuttle—a Kansas-born drama teacher with a spirit far more expansive than the prairies of her youth—was returning from St. Louis. She had spent the week assisting a Shakespearean repertory troupe, lending her sharp eye for stagecraft to a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Matthew had missed the sound of her voice, which always seemed to fill their home far more effectively than the furniture could.

He unfolded his newspaper, his eyes skimming over headlines that made the world feel precarious. He read of the “Campaign against the Un-German Spirit,” where pro-Nazi students in Berlin had burned tens of thousands of books by Einstein and Hemingway. Further down, a dispatch noted Mahatma Gandhi’s slow physical recovery following his twenty-day hunger strike to protest the mistreatment of the Untouchables. Most unsettling were the reports of anarchist unrest in Spain; bombings in Barcelona and general strikes had left the country paralyzed and bloodied.

He felt a brief, fluttering gratitude for the Atlantic Ocean. He was forty-seven now, his days of dreaming of glory long buried in the Irish soil he’d left behind in 1926.

Movement on the platform level caught his eye. A group of men in dark suits and fedoras were moving with a rigid, professional synchronized gait. They weren’t railroad men; they had the squared shoulders and low-brimmed stares of men who carried authority in their holsters. In the center of the phalanx was a man in a light suit, his wrists bound in steel. This was the 7:15 arrival from Hot Springs, Arkansas.

“Move it along, Frank,” one of the agents muttered, his voice echoing off the marble.

Matthew watched from a distance as they led the prisoner toward the parking lot. He noted the way the agents stood—stiff, scanning the perimeter, expecting a trouble they felt they could handle. He went back to his paper.

Then the world outside fractured.

It wasn’t a single sound, but a rhythmic tearing—rat-tat-tat-tat—followed by the heavy, booming thud of shotguns. Inside the station, the sound was muffled by the thick stone walls, sounding more like a distant construction site than a massacre. But then came the screams.

The heavy glass doors swung open, and a man stumbled in, his hat gone and his face pale.

“They’re killing them!” he shrieked. “They’re all down! The agents, the prisoner—blood everywhere— in the parking lot!”

Panic rippled through the station’s Great Hall. People dropped their luggage and ran; a young reporter sprinted toward the east entrance.

Matthew Orr did not move. He stood beneath the great clock, his heart hammering, a familiar, cold dread washing over him—the same dread he’d felt in Dublin when the air turned to lead. But he did not run toward the noise. He had seen what a Thompson submachine gun did to a human body, and he had no curiosity left for it.

He turned his back on the carnage outside and walked toward the gates where the St. Louis train would soon arrive. He checked his pocket watch. Jessie would be stepping off that train shortly. The world could descend into madness, but Matthew Orr would be exactly where he promised he would be. He would be the first thing she saw, standing in the quiet, waiting to lead her back to their home on Van Brunt Boulevard.