Hank was a large and friendly man with black hair and black stubble, dressed in white overalls. He was smoking a cigarette and seemed to be the only one listening to Tom Waits on the speakers, because the kids were as engrossed as collectors of rare pieces at an archaeological dig in Egypt. A girl with blue hair, bare feet, an open blouse and miniskirt, and a Japanese tattoo on her neck was standing in front of a photo of Hitchcock and trying to communicate on her cell phone. “The trailer? Is the trailer out?” she insisted in an energetic voice.
Hank made a gesture to the girl with blue hair, and she took over his place behind the counter. We went up to the room at the end of a staircase that also led down to the street. Hank had left the university to open the video store, a meeting place that brought together the best of alternative Berkeley. He hadn’t finished his doctorate, and that had made him a marginal figure, he said, and he’d refused to go and fight in ’Nam, and that had made him a criminal. He’d lived in exile in Mexico and returned during the Carter era, and now he was living in a semilegal state accepted by the police. He had to go to Mexico or Canada every three months, which allowed him to renew both his United Nations refugee visa and his VHS catalog of foreign films. “I’m an American by permission, but legally I’m stateless,” he said, with the pride of a citizen of the future. The people who participated in the group that met at his shop paid a monthly fee, from which Hank received a sort of stipend that enabled him to maintain the video store and a bar where they served Californian food (“that’s to say, Mexican food,” he said) and wine and beer. He’d participated in the boycott of Chilean wine during the Pinochet era and still held to that policy, waiting for the tyrant to die. So I ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio. Hank ordered a Corona and lit another of his Egyptian cigarettes (could they be Egyptian?). I told him I was thinking about visiting Tom Munk in prison and was trying to find traces of a possible relationship between Munk and Professor Ida Brown during the years when they’d overlapped at Berkeley. I showed him the photo of Ida. It was turning gray, but you could still see her fairly well. He thought he remembered that pollita, looking at the young Ida, a dazzling beauty who smiled with an air of mystery. As for Munk, he came to the place often, he’d been quite interested in film. Very reserved; sometimes he’d stay and have a beer but never said much. The FBI had come to see Hank because they knew that Thomas had frequented the place. Tom had stopped by here every now and then, even in the time when he was living in the Montana woods.
“One guy carrying out all those attacks on his own, it sounds odd to me,” he said. “There are many environmentalist groups that would’ve helped him, no problem. Menéndez and his guard dogs want to put up a wall around this case and isolate Tom; you already know how things go around here, if it’s more than one individual who’s gotten into something like that, then you have to talk about politics. Isolated, they can turn him into a clinical case. In spite of the FBI, the local cops think that the most radical environmentalists must have collaborated with Tom, but they prefer the story of the lone man.”
Hank led me into his darkroom. The red lamp gave a bloody cast to the setting, and undeveloped rolls of film hung in the air. Hank enlarged the photo and projected it against a wall. Using a harsh flashlight, he showed the face, slightly distant and in profile, of the young man who was Tom Munk. The proof, according to Hank, was the video box of Johnny Guitar. The Nicholas Ray Western that was visible in his hand. In the rental catalog, the movie appeared to have been checked out on June 13, 1975 and returned on June 15. By that time, Munk had already abandoned his position as a professor but still dropped by Berkeley now and then, Hank said. He’d spend a few days in the Hotel Durant, recovering from his solitude. He’d drop by here and study the catalog very carefully before choosing a film. I imagine he watched Westerns because he liked the way they filmed nature in the place where he was living. And also because he was a romantic and admired those solitary heroes who faced off alone against society’s evildoers.
“We knew that he’d isolated himself,” he said, “and that he was working on a book, but no one at that time knew what his true activities were.”
“Ida, for her part,” I said, “was already teaching in La Jolla at that time, that is, at the University of California San Diego; maybe she came to see him in Berkeley.”
Hank doubted that he could have been acting on his own. So Ida, then? Well, it’s realistic to suppose that some people were in charge of sending the letters from distant addresses. A task they could perform without having to be in the loop about the objectives. Often undercover agents infiltrate these groups, and they don’t want to paint them white, so they don’t expose them publicly, they just kill them one by one where they find them. Justice falls on a single culprit, and that
