He moved away, followed by the black guard who conducted him down the hallway the way someone would move a large, wounded animal.
“Take care, Mr. Munk, take care.”
3
When I returned to the hotel, Munk’s words were still ringing in my ears. It was Ida’s accidental death that had made him break his silence and send the manifesto that led him to ruin. Was that it? He didn’t give me any explanation. “We are many,” he had said. It was an ambiguous phrase that could only be understood if you were familiar with his ideas. “I am Chambiges, I am Badinguet, I am Prado, I am all the names in history.” Never being oneself, changing identities, inventing a past.
She was like that too, I’m sure; I had one piece of evidence, the little glimmer of her passion for secrecy, for the occult in life. I could imagine perfectly well Ida’s nocturnal trips to distant cities, the studied movements, the danger that made her pause in the street with a gun in her purse and her heart in her mouth. If she’d died on one of her clandestine journeys and been discovered, everyone would be talking about her, condemning her and reviling her, yet they would be keeping her alive as long as they cursed her name. You have to be very desperate and, at the same time, feel a cold and lucid hatred in order to go out and kill. Maybe that’s how it was. I do not confirm nor deny it. No justification, no explanation, but it might be possible, even right. It depends on the circumstances. Or maybe it was just that Munk wanted to imagine a multitude of young people that existed in the United States who were determined to take action, even without knowing each other. He had demonstrated that a lone man could act and elude the FBI for twenty years. It could be. I do not confirm nor deny it.
Through the hotel window could be seen the rain and the night; it was one of those brief and violent summer storms. On the other side of the hotel parking lot, on the outskirts, lay the countryside, the darkened plain, and in the background, far away, a few indistinct glimmers. They were the lights of the prison, the high wall like a starry sky. I thought that Munk would be looking out at the rain too, his hands on the bars, and perhaps he could see, in the distance, amid the darkness, the reflection of one light in a hotel room window.
Epilogue
Thomas Munk was executed on August 2, 2005, ten years after his capture. The sentence was postponed several times because of appeals, inquiries, and new trials. A multitude pleaded on his behalf, but the court denied amnesty. Many years have now passed since that day, but I can remember certain details exactly. The electric chair painted yellow, in the center of a glass enclosure. Munk’s worn-out basketball shoes with their laces knotted and intertwined, and the sound of their rubber soles on the concrete floor. His mother was there with him, and the man in the white suit as well. The transmission over the prison’s closed-circuit system had been captured live on an internet stream.
My real name is Thomas Reginald Munk, not The Shadow, not Recycler, I’m not the intellectual killer the way they slandered me, the ones who uselessly pursued me for twenty years and only managed to capture me when my brother betrayed me.
Look at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lecture on ethics: “If a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world.” Ethics is that explosion. Yahweh was the first terrorist. In order to impose his Law, he devoted himself to destroying cities and killing Job’s children. Why else do you think Dostoevsky had the idea to turn Alyosha Karamazov, the aspiring saint, into a revolutionary?
The video of the execution was on YouTube for a while, but his mother appealed to the authorities and managed to have them take it down. For a few weeks it was replaced by the image of Munk receiving the Fields Medal, but that document too was lost in the seas of the Web.
It was Ida Brown who got me tied up in this story, and it’s for her that I’ve written this book. The memories remain fixed, like sheets of film. Her, dressed in her gray overcoat, a yellow scarf around her head, waiting in the entrance of the Hyatt. Standing by the bed as she took off her earrings and then began to undress. She had these white spots on her skin, a smooth and pale tattoo across her body. They were birthmarks, traces of the past, which made her more beautiful still.
“I’m dappled,” Ida smiled. “Can you see, pichón?” And she leaned forward to show me that ghostly pattern on her body. “My mother doesn’t have them, but my grandmother does, and my grandmother says we have an Inuit ancestor… Imagine, a woman in the whiteness of the Arctic. They never say their true first name, it’s a secret, they only reveal it when they feel they’re going to die.”
Two weeks after my visit with Munk,
