remember? You said our movement needed a martyr. Well, I’m working on it.”
“Good, Ali, you work on it, man. In the meantime, get back to your brainchild, the Hug. And Eleventh Street.”
“How’s next Sunday’s rally coming on?”
“Great. Looks like we’ll pull in fifty thousand black people on the Green come midday. Now fuck off, Ali, let me get on with writing my speech.”
As ordered, Wesley/Ali fucked off to Eleventh Street, there to spread the word that Mohammed el Nesr was going to speak next Sunday on Holloman Green. Not only did everyone have to be there, but everyone also had to persuade their neighbors and friends to be there. Mohammed was a brilliant, charismatic orator, raved his disciple, well worth listening to. Come along, find out just how thoroughly Whitey was screwing black people. No black girl child was safe, but Mohammed el Nesr had answers.
What a pity, thought Wesley/Ali in one corner of his perpetually busy mind, that no one white would think to shoot Mohammed el Nesr down. What a martyr he would make! But this was staid old Connecticut, not the South or the West: no neo-Nazis, Klanners or even typical rednecks. One of the original thirteen states, a haven of free speech.
Whatever Wesley/Ali thought, Carmine knew that Connecticut had its share of neo-Nazis, Klanners and rednecks; he also knew that most of it was talk, and talk was cheap. But every rabid black hater was being watched, for Carmine was determined that no one was going to draw a bead on Mohammed el Nesr on Sunday afternoon. While Mohammed planned his rally, Carmine planned how to protect him: where the police snipers would be, how many cops he could put in plain clothes to patrol the outskirts of an anti-white crowd. No way was a bullet going to cut Mohammed el Nesr down and make a martyr out of him.
Then on Saturday night the snow returned, a February blizzard that left eighteen inches on the ground overnight; a shrieking sub-zero wind ensured that no rally would take place on Holloman Green. Saved by the winter bell yet again.
So today Carmine was at liberty to drive out to Route 133 and see if Mrs. Eliza Smith was home. She was.
“The boys went to school, very disappointed. If the snow had only waited until last night, no school today.”
“I’m sorry for them, but very glad for me, Mrs. Smith.”
“The black rally on Holloman Green?”
“Exactly.”
“God loves peace,” she said simply.
“Then why doesn’t He issue more of it?” asked the veteran of military and civilian warfare.
“Because having created us, He moved on to someplace else in a very large universe. Perhaps when He did create us, He put a special cog in our machinery to make us peace loving. Then the cog wore down, and whammo! Too late for God to return.”
“An interesting theory,” he said.
“I’ve been baking butterfly cakes,” Eliza said, leading the way into her mock-antique kitchen. “How about I make a fresh pot of coffee and you try some?”
Butterfly cakes, he discovered, were little yellow cakes Eliza had gouged the hilly tops off, filled the hollows with sweetened whipped cream, then cut the tops in two and put them back the wrong way up; they did look quite like fat little wings. They were, besides, delicious.
“Take them away, please,” he begged after scoffing four. “If you don’t, I’ll just sit here and eat the lot.”
“Okay,” she said, stuck them on the counter and sat down as if she meant to stay. “Now, what brings you here, Lieutenant?”
“Desdemona Dupre. She said you were the one I should talk to about the Hug people because you know them best. Will you fill me in, or tell me to go take a running jump?”
“Three months ago I would have told you to go take that jump, but now things are different.” She toyed with her coffee cup. “Do you know that Bob isn’t returning to the Hug?”
“Yes. Everybody at the Hug seems to know that.”
“It’s a tragedy, Lieutenant. He’s a broken man. There has always been a dark side to him, and since I’ve known him all my life, I’ve known about his dark side too.”
“What do you mean by a dark side, Mrs. Smith?”
“Utter depression – a yawning pit – nothingness. He calls it one of those, depending. His first fully fledged attack happened after the death of our daughter, Nancy. Leukemia.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“So were we,” she said, blinking away tears. “Nancy was the eldest, died aged seven. She’d be sixteen now.”
“Have you a picture of her?”
“Hundreds, but I put them away because of Bob’s tendency to depression. Hold on a minute.” Off she went to return with an unframed color photograph of an adorable child, obviously taken before her illness ate her away. Curly blonde hair, big blue eyes, her mother’s rather thin mouth.
“Thank you,” he said, and put the picture face downward on the table. “I take it he recovered from that depression?”
“Yes, thanks to the Hug. Having to mother the Hug held him together. But not this time. He’ll retreat into trains forever.”
“How will you manage financially?” he asked, not realizing how longingly he was looking at the butterfly cakes.
She got up to pour him more coffee and plopped two cakes on his plate. “Here, eat them. That’s an order.” Her lips seemed dry; she licked them. “Financially we have no worries. Both of our families left us with trust funds that mean we don’t have to earn livings for ourselves. What a horrific prospect for a pair of Yankees! The work ethic is ineradicable.”
“What about your sons?”
“Our trusts pass to them. They’re good boys.”
“Why does the Professor beat them?”
She didn’t attempt to deny it. “The dark side. It doesn’t happen often, honestly. Only when they carp at him the way boys do – won’t leave a touchy subject alone, or won’t take no for an answer. They’re typical boys.”
“I guess I was wondering if the boys are going to join their father in playing with the trains.”
“I think,” Eliza said deliberately, “that both my sons would rather die than enter that basement. Bob is – selfish.”
“I had noticed,” he said gently.
“He hates sharing his trains. That’s really why the boys tried to trash them – did he tell you that the damage was disastrous?”
“Yes, that it took four years to rebuild.”
“That’s just not true. A little boy of seven and another of five? Horse feathers, Lieutenant! It was more a business of going around picking things up off the floor than anything else. Then he beat them unmercifully – I had to wrestle the switch off him. And I told him that if he ever hurt the boys that badly again, I’d go to the cops. He knew I meant it. Though he still beat them from time to time. Never in a furor, like he did over the trains. No more sadistic punishments. He likes to criticize them because they don’t measure up to their sainted sister.” She smiled, a twist of the lips that didn’t register amusement. “Though I can assure you, Lieutenant, that Nancy was no more a saint than Bobby or Sam is.”
“You haven’t had it easy, Mrs. Smith.”
“Perhaps not, but it’s nothing I can’t handle. So long as I can handle life, I’m okay.”
He ate the cakes. “Superb,” he said with a sigh. “Tell me about Walter Polonowski and his wife.”
“They got themselves hopelessly tangled in a religious net,” Eliza said, shaking her head as if at incredible denseness. “She thought he’d disapprove of birth control, he thought she’d never consent to birth control. So they had four kids when neither of them really wanted any, especially before their marriage was old enough to let them get to know each other. Adjusting to life with a stranger is hard, but a lot harder when that stranger changes in front of your eyes within scant months – throws up, swells up, complains, the works. Paola is many years younger than Walt – oh, she was
