He’d written that line on his personal copy before sending it to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and now it was one of the district attorney’s articles of evidence to demonstrate that whoever had sent the bombs was the same one who wrote the text.
Munk seemed to have forgotten about that important postscript, and he was certain that his “pamphlet” (that’s what he called the manifesto) would be the basis for a future vindication of his memory. “He will not be forgotten,” said a very elegantly dressed man, his face covered with little scars from who knew which wars, who stood under the shadow of a tree and told of how he’d spent one night a few months before talking to Tom at the bar in a terminal station in Oklahoma; they’d both missed the same bus and were waiting together for the first morning service. The speaker was a gray-haired man who looked out of place there, dressed as he was in a white linen suit, matching shoes, a sky-blue shirt, and a gray tie. He had a dignified air, but there was also something of a ruffian and a dandy about him. He spoke in a soothing tone and had captured the attention of the people around him. They’d spent that night talking in the nearly empty drugstore inside the half-closed station, and Munk had spoken not of bombs or violence but instead of his grand plans. “He seemed to be a man who needed to talk, who just needed a soul to listen to him. He told me he was a traveler and gave me some name (Kurtz or Kurzio, I can’t remember now), but of course I didn’t believe him and figured he was a fugitive, an evangelical pastor expelled from his community for sexual abuse, or a failed writer, or a rentier who’d been ripped off. We know he’s a murderer now, but in that moment I perceived something unsettling and attractive in him, a danger to himself, and I thought he was suicidal. He seemed burdened, as if he was on the point of giving up,” the man in white said, “but the thing that left an impression on me was seeing that his hand was scorched, the left one, not bandaged, but with flaky skin, like someone whose job required him to put his hands in the fire.”
Chapter Twelve
1
I arrived at the prison at ten in the morning; I presented my documents and the letter from Parker at the counter in the entrance and, in the control area, asked to speak with Dr. Beck, a doctor in residence at the jail, a friend—or employee—of Sam Carrington, who used him as a liaison between his boys (as he called the inmates) and his used car business. A while later he appeared, a jubilant fat man with the look of a quack doctor from a country fair, dressed in a white lab coat with his name embroidered on it. I imagined the walls of his consulting room with framed titles and vague academic diplomas. He didn’t seem to have much to do that morning and was smoking a mother-of-pearl pipe, which accentuated his comedy-actor look. The truth is that, thanks to him (and another hundred dollars), I was able to enter without any issues and made it through all of the checkpoints.
“A high-security prison in the United States is a complex institution, perhaps the most complex form of social life imaginable,” the doctor said as we descended in a glass-walled elevator. “Really, it’s an experimental laboratory to test the behavior of men under extreme conditions, an excellent place for a medical psychiatrist like me to work,” he said. We went out into a covered courtyard and, after passing down a tunnel, stopped before a commanding set of white bars. Dr. Beck presented me to the guard and withdrew. We’d meet again on the other side, once I passed through the control area. I listened as they shut the bolts behind me and then descended into the basement, accompanied by a prison guard.
At the far end was the identification area, a dark room with a metallic wire mesh screen at the front that didn’t allow you to see through from the other side. On the back wall were lines indicating where to stand and a series of numbers to measure the height of the person who was going to be processed. Opposite me, on the ceiling, there were several spotlights that immediately blinded me. The guard accompanying me had gone away, and I stood alone in the room. Over a loudspeaker they ordered me to place myself in the middle of the white lines under a latticed skylight. Behind the screen everything was dark, and from there issued the voice that asked me the questions. Who did I want to see (they already knew), and for what purpose; I told them I needed to show the prisoner some documents that might prove useful in the trial. They asked whether I had a criminal record, whether I had any markings or scars, what religion I belonged to, what race, whether I was addicted to drugs. They receive
