“I would rather see you dead than know you were the one who gave away your brother.”
“The converts, the ex-communists, the ones who become disillusioned of their old convictions, they’re the real enfants terribles of contemporary politics,” Menéndez used to say, and when he saw Peter he realized that he was one of that breed.
“If Judas had been victorious, we wouldn’t have so many problems in Palestine,” Menéndez declared. According to him, Judas recognized that Christ had turned into a hardened, inflexible extremist and that violence would be the result of those subversive sermons by the one who called himself the Shepherd of mankind.
Menéndez’s men arrived in the town in groups, all under different pretexts, and set up in local hotels or in the houses of police officers around the area. They didn’t say who they were looking for, but early in the morning they entered the woods and patrolled the area near the valley.
Tom was going on with his life as usual and didn’t notice these strange movements. Only Daisy, the parrot, seemed frightened, and she squawked constantly (“Let’s go to the hotel, let’s go to the hotel, Tom”) and flapped around. Munk ended up covering her cage with a black cloth, but the parrot grew furious, and he had to take it off because she squawked even more emphatically under the rubbery fabric, in an incomprehensible but furious language.
Finally, on the night of June 18, the FBI agents approached the shack as though facing off against an armed gang. They always behaved that way; they never made a move until they had a ten-to-one advantage, and they always acted as though the suspects or subjects under surveillance were the kind of offenders ready to go down fighting (they used expressions like that). They slipped in among the trees, observing the light that flickered in the cabin; it wasn’t completely dark yet, and, as they silently waited to burst in, the parrot started to screech from the branch of a tree where her cage was hanging. “Who’s coming, Tom, who’s coming, Tom?” Munk poked his head out through the window and stood motionless for a time, while the special police snipers aimed at him through the telescopic scopes of their rifles. But Munk went back inside.
The sheriff approached the cabin and called at the door with two calm knocks, just as he always did. When Thomas Munk opened the door, the whole gang swarmed in and took him down as Menéndez walked in, triumphant. From the floor, where he’d been thrown by the Feds who were now holding him down, Tom raised his head.
“How did you find me?” he said.
“It was your brother,” Menéndez said, to break him down.
“So it wasn’t you.”
(“Two of a kind,” said Parker. “Each the best in his own style.”)
The cabin was clean, organized, with books on the walls and canisters of explosives on the top shelves. There were no weapons in sight. They went through the drawers, turning everything out, but what were they looking for? Meanwhile, Thomas Munk had sat at his worktable and, his hands and feet shackled, began reading a book on mathematical analysis.
Once they’d finished the inspection, astonished that this man, in this place, could have been capable of doing what he’d done, they forced him to stand up. But forced is just an expression. They gave him a signal, and Thomas Munk stood with the dignity and pride of a political prisoner.
5
What immediately circulated in the media and became the center of the debate was a singular confusion: How is this possible? How could this happen? It was no longer in the North American tradition of the lone killer who, in a sudden act, enters a bar and kills all of the customers because they’d refused to serve him an Irish coffee the night before, or the high school boy who shoots everyone who gets in his way because they’ve been calling him fat for the last three weeks and he’s failing gym class. Not even the supermarket employee who gets laid off and, since he can’t appeal to a union or support organization, goes up into a tower and kills everyone in a kind of private political violence. These events proliferate in the history of a society that has made its flag out of individualism and depoliticization. In this case it was a man from the elite who dedicated himself to carrying out violent acts systematically over the course of years, eluding the national persecutory machine of the FBI, for reasons that were not personal but rather political and ideological.
He acted on his own, a self-made man, expressing his culture’s values, a pure American, yet his private life expressed not the success but the failure of the system. The fact that he alone held the secret to his actions, that he’d never confided in anyone for years and years, was the most extraordinary but also the most North American part of the whole story. The people who’d known him were surprised and alarmed, and some rejected the possibility that the same peaceable man they used to spend time with could have turned into a terrorist and a murderer.
One night, Nina knocked on the glass of my window and sat down with me to watch the news on TV. It was very late, because of the time difference, when we saw Thomas Munk for the first time on ABC News. They were transferring him from prison to the courthouse, and he came out of the police van, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, his face bristly with unkempt stubble but showing a smile on his lips. He looked wild, a man of the woods, and when he saw the camera he raised his cuffed hands with one fist closed as if in a victorious salute. His ankles were chained together, and he moved clumsily as he
