The White Road

by John Connolly

  I found that I was clutching the handle of my coffee cup so tightly that it had left a mark on the palm of my hand. I released my grip and watched the blood flow back into the white areas. “If he’s bailed, he’ll flee,” I said. “He won’t wait around for a trial.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  We were both hunched over the table, and we both seemed to realize it simultaneously. Over near the window, the two old men had turned to watch us, their attention attracted by the tension between us. I leaned back, then looked at them. They returned to watching the traffic.

  “Anyway,” said Ornstead, “even Cooper won’t set a bail below seven figures and we don’t believe that Faulkner has access to that level of funds.”

  All of the Fellowship’s assets had been frozen, and the AG’s office was trying to follow the paper trail that might lead to other accounts undiscovered so far. But somebody was paying Faulkner’s lawyers, and a defense fund had been opened into which dispiriting numbers of right-wing crazies and religious nuts were pouring money.

  “Do we know who’s organizing the defense fund?” I asked. Officially, the fund was the responsibility of a firm of lawyers, Muren amp; Associates, in Savannah, Georgia, but it was a pretty low-rent operation. There had to be more to it than a bunch of Southern shysters working out of an office with plastic chairs. Faulkner’s own legal team, led by Grim Jim Grimes, was separate from it. Stone features apart, Jim Grimes was one of the best lawyers in New England. He could talk his way out of cancer, and he didn’t come cheap.

  Ornstead blew out a large breath. It smelled of coffee and nicotine.

  “That’s the rest of the bad news. Muren had a visitor a couple of days back, a guy by the name of Edward Carlyle. Phone records show that the two of them have been in daily contact since this thing started, and Carlyle is a cosignatory on the fund checking account.”

  I shrugged. “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Ornstead tapped his fingers lightly on the table in a delicate cadence.

  “Edward Carlyle is Roger Bowen’s right-hand man. And Roger Bowen is-”

  “A creep,” I finished. “And a racist.”

  “And a neo-Nazi,” added Ornstead. “Yup, clock stopped sometime around 1939 for Bowen. He’s quite a guy. Probably has shares in gas ovens in the hope that things might pick up again on the old ‘final solution’ front. As far as we can tell, Bowen is the one behind the defense fund. He’s been keeping a low profile these last few years but something has drawn him out from under his rock. He’s making speeches, appearing at rallies, passing around the collection plate. Seems to me like he wants Faulkner back on the streets pretty bad.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “Bowen’s base is in South Carolina, isn’t it?”

  “He moves between South Carolina and Georgia, but spends most of his time somewhere up by the Chattooga River. Why, you planning on visiting down there?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I ask why?”

  “A friend in need.”

  “The worst kind. Well, while you’re down there you could always ask Bowen why Faulkner is so important to him, though I wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t imagine you’re top of his wish list of friends he hasn’t met yet.”

  “I’m not top of anybody’s wish list.”

  Ornstead stood and patted me on the shoulder.

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  I walked with him to the door. His car was parked right outside.

  “You heard everything, right?” I asked. I assumed that Stan had been listening in to all that had passed between Faulkner and me.

  “Yeah. We talking about the guard?”

  “Anson.”

  “Doesn’t concern me. You?”

  “She’s underage. I don’t believe that Anson is going to be an influence for the better in her life.”

  “No, I guess not. We can get someone to look into it.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “Done. Now I got a question for you. What happened in there? Sounded like there was a scuffle.”

  Despite the coffee, I could still taste the mouthwash.

  “Faulkner spit in my mouth.”

  “Shit. You going to need a test?”

  “I doubt it, but I feel like swallowing battery acid to burn it out of my mouth and insides.”

  “Why’d he do it? To get you pissed at him?”

  I shook my head.

  “No, he told me it was a gift, to help me see more clearly.”

  “See what?”

  I didn’t answer, but I knew.

  He wanted me to see what was waiting for him, and what was coming for me.

  He wanted me to see his kind.

  6

  THE MILITANT RACIST movement has never been particularly significant in terms of size. Its hard-core membership is probably 25,000 at most, augmented by maybe a further 150,000 active sympathizers and possibly another 400,000 fly-by-nighters, who offer neither money nor manpower but will tell you all about the threat to the white race posed by the coloreds and the Jews if you loosen them up with enough booze. More than half of the hard core comprises Klan members with the remainder consisting of skinheads and assorted Nazis, and the level of cooperation between the groups is pretty minimal, sometimes descending into a competitiveness bordering on outright aggression. Membership is rarely constant: people move in and out of the groups on a regular basis, depending on the requirements of employers, enemies, or the courts.

  But at the head of each group is a cadre of lifelong activists, and even as the names of their movements change, even as they fight amongst themselves and shatter into smaller and smaller splinters, those leaders remain. They are missionaries, zealots, proselytizers for the cause, spreading the gospel of intolerance at state fairs, rallies, and conferences, through newsletters and pamphlets and late-night radio shows.

  Of these men, Roger Bowen was one of the longest serving, and also one of the most dangerous. Born to a Baptist family in Gaffney, South Carolina, by the foothills of the Blue Ridge, he had passed through the ranks of any number of far-right organizations, including some of the most notorious neo-Nazi groups of the past twenty years. In 1983, at the age of twenty-four, Bowen had been one of three young men questioned without charge about their involvement in the Order, the secret society formed by the racist Robert Matthews and linked to Aryan Nations. During 1983 and 1984 the Order carried out a series of armored car and bank robberies to fund its operations, which included assorted arson attacks, bombings, and counterfeiting efforts. The Order was also responsible for the murders of the Denver talk show host Alan Berg and a man named Walter West, a member of the Order who was suspected of betraying its secrets. Eventually, all members of the Order were apprehended, with the exception of Matthews himself, who was killed during a shoot-out with FBI agents in 1984. Since there was no evidence to link Bowen to its activities he escaped prosecution, and the truth about the extent of Bowen’s involvement in the Order died with Matthews. Despite its comparatively small force of activists, the FBI’s operations against the Order had consumed one quarter of the bureau’s total manpower resources. The Order’s size had worked in its favor, making it difficult to infiltrate by outsiders and informers, the unfortunate Walter West excepted. It was a lesson that Bowen never forgot.

  Bowen then drifted for a time before finding a home of sorts in the Klan movement, although by then it had been largely defanged by the activities of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program: klaverns had folded, its prestige had plummeted, and its average age had begun to drop as older members left or died. The result was that the Klan’s traditionally uneasy relationship with the trappings of neo-Nazism became less ambiguous, the new bloods being less fussy about such matters than the more senior members. Bowen joined Bill Wilkinson’s Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but by the time the Invisible Empire disbanded in 1993
, following an expensive lawsuit, Bowen had already established his own Klan, the White Confederates.

  Except Bowen didn’t go recruiting members like the other Klans and even the Klan name was little more than a flag of convenience for him. The White Confederates never numbered more than a dozen individuals, but they wielded power and influence beyond their size and contributed significantly to the ongoing Nazification of the Klan in the 1980s, further blurring the traditional lines between the Klansmen and the neo-Nazis.

  Bowen wasn’t a Holocaust denier either: he liked the idea of the Holocaust, the possibility of a force capable of murder on a previously unthought of scale, murder with a sense of order and planning behind it. It was this, more than any moral qualms, that had led Bowen to distance himself from the casual outrages, the sporadic outbursts of violence, that were endemic to the movement. At the annual Stone Mountain rally in Georgia he had even publicly condemned one incident, the beating to death of a middle-aged black man named Bill Perce in North Carolina by a group of drunken klavern rejects, only to hear himself booed off the platform. Since then, Bowen had avoided Stone Mountain. They didn’t understand him and he didn’t need them, although he continued to work behind the scenes, supporting occasional Klan marches in small towns on the Georgia-South Carolina border. Even if, as frequently occurred, only a handful of men took part, the threat of a march still gained newspaper coverage and bleats of outrage from liberal sheep, and contributed to the atmosphere of intimidation and distrust that Bowen needed for his work to continue. The White Confederates was largely a front, a piece of theater akin to the waves of a magician’s wand before a trick is performed. The real trickery was being performed out of sight, and the movement of the wand was not only unconnected with the illusion but largely immaterial to it.

  For it was Bowen who was trying to heal the old enmities; Bowen who was building bridges over the divides between the Christian Patriots and the Aryans, the skinheads and the Klans; Bowen who was reaching out to the more vocal, and extreme, members of the Christian right; Bowen who understood the importance of unity, of intercommunication, of extending the funding base; and Bowen who now felt that, by bringing Faulkner under his protection, he could convince those who believed the preacher’s story to redirect their money toward him. The Fellowship had pulled in more than $500,000 dollars in the year before Faulkner’s arrest. It was small beans compared to the kind of cash flow enjoyed by the better-known televangelists but it represented serious income to Bowen and his kind. Bowen had watched the money flowing into Faulkner’s appeal fund: there was already enough to meet 10 percent of a low seven-figure bail and then some, and it was still coming in, but no bondsman would be crazy enough to cover Faulkner’s bail in the event of a review finding in his favor. Bowen had other plans, other irons in the fire. If they played it right, Faulkner could be out and vanished before the end of the month, and if rumors persisted that Bowen had squirreled him away to safety, then so much the better for Bowen. In fact, it wouldn’t much matter after that if the preacher lived or died. It would be enough that he remained unseen, and he could do that just as easily below ground as above it.

  But Bowen also felt an admiration for what the old preacher and his Fellowship had achieved. Without resorting to the bank jobs that had undermined the Order, and with manpower never numbering more than four or five persons, he had carried out a campaign of murder and intimidation against soft targets for the best part of three decades and had covered his tracks brilliantly. Even the FBI and the ATF were still having problems connecting the Fellowship to the deaths of abortion doctors, outspoken homosexuals, Jewish leaders, and the other bugbears of the far right whose annihilation Faulkner was believed to have authorized.

  It was strange, but Bowen had barely considered the possibility of allying himself to Faulkner’s cause until Kittim had appeared. Kittim was a legend among the extreme right, a folk hero. He had come to Bowen shortly after Faulkner’s arrest, and from there, the idea of involving himself with the case had just come naturally to Bowen. And if he couldn’t remember exactly what Kittim was reputed to have done, or even where he had come from, well, that hardly mattered. That was the way with folk heroes, wasn’t it? They were only partly real, but with Kittim beside him, Bowen felt a new sense of purpose, of near invincibility.

  It was so strong that he hardly noticed the fear that he felt in the man’s presence.

  Bowen’s admiration, spurred into action by Kittim’s arrival, had apparently appealed to Faulkner’s ego, for through his lawyers the preacher had agreed to nail his colors to Bowen’s mast, had even offered up funds from hidden accounts, untraceable by his persecutors, if Bowen could arrange his disappearance. More than anything else, the old man did not want to die in jail; he would rather be hunted for the remainder of his life than rot behind bars while awaiting trial. Faulkner had asked for just one further favor. Bowen had been kind of annoyed at this, given the fact that he was already offering to hide Faulkner from the law, but when Faulkner told him what he wanted Bowen had relaxed. It was just a small favor, after all, and would give Bowen almost as much pleasure as it would give Faulkner.

  Bowen believed that, in Kittim, he had found just the man for the job, but he was wrong.

  In truth, the man had found him.

  Bowen’s truck pulled into the small clearing before the hut, just across the South Carolina state line in eastern Tennessee. The building was dark wood, four rough-hewn steps leading to a porch, two narrow windows on either side. It looked like a blockhouse, designed with defense in mind.

  A man sat on a rocking chair to the right of the door, smoking a cigarette. This was Carlyle. He had short curly hair that had begun to recede when he was in his early twenties but had mysteriously arrested its retreat in his thirties, leaving him with a clown wig of fair hair around his domed skull. He was in good condition, like most of those whom Bowen kept close. He drank little, and Bowen couldn’t remember ever having seen him smoke before. He looked tired and ill. Bowen noticed the smell as he approached: vomit.

  “You okay?” asked Bowen.

  Carlyle wiped his lips with his fingers and examined the tips for any detritus. “Why? I got shit on me?”

  “No, but you smell bad.”

  Carlyle took a last drag on the cigarette, then carefully extinguished the butt on the sole of his boot. When he was satisfied that it was cold, he tore it to shreds and let the breeze carry the remains away.

  “Where did we get this guy, Roger?” he asked when he was done.

  “Who? Kittim?”

  “Yeah, Kittim.”

  “He’s a legend,” said Bowen. It had the sound of a mantra about it.

  Carlyle ran a hand over his bare pate. “I know that. I mean, I think I know.” His features collapsed into uncertainty, then rebuilt themselves into an expression of disgust. “Anyway, wherever he came from, he’s a freak.”

  “We need him.”

  “We got by okay without him until now.”

  “This is different. Did you get anything out of the guy?”

  Carlyle shook his head.

  “He doesn’t know anything. He’s just muscle.”

  “You sure?”

  “Believe me, if he knew anything he’d have told us by now. But that sick fuck keeps at him.”

  Bowen wasn’t a great believer in Jewish conspiracies. Sure, there were wealthy Jews with power and influence, but they were pretty scattered when you looked at the big picture. Still, if Faulkner was to be believed, some old Jews in New York had tried to have him killed, and had dispatched a man to do it. That man was now dead, but Faulkner wanted to know who had sent him so that, when the time came, he could revenge himself upon them, and Bowen was of the opinion that it couldn’t hurt to know what they were up against. That was why they had taken the kid, pulled him from the streets of Greenville after he drew attention to himself by asking the wrong questions in the wrong places. After that, he had driven him up here, gagged and bound in the trunk of a car
, and handed over to Kittim.

  “Where is he?”

  “Out back.”

  As Bowen moved to pass him, Carlyle extended an arm to block his way.

  “You eaten yet?”

  “Not much.”

  “Lucky you.”

  The arm dropped. Bowen continued on around the side of the house until he came to an enclosed pen that had once been used to hold pigs. The stench of them still hung around it, thought Bowen, until he saw what lay on the bare ground at the center of the pen and realized that what he was smelling was not animal, but human.

  The young man was naked and staked out in the sun. He had a short, neatly-trimmed beard, and his black hair was pasted to his skull with sweat and mud. A leather belt had been tied around his head. His teeth were visible, gritted against it, as the wounds he had suffered were widened and probed. The man stooped over him wore coveralls and gloves as he worked on the body, his fingers exploring the new cavities and apertures he had created with his blade, pausing occasionally as the staked man tensed and made soft mewling sounds from behind the gag before continuing his work. Bowen didn’t know how he had kept the kid on the ground alive, let alone conscious, but then Kittim was a man of many talents. He rose at the sound of Bowen’s approach, his body unfolding like that of a disturbed insect, and turned to face him.

  Kittim was tall, six-two or six-three. The cap and glasses that he habitually wore almost obscured his features entirely, intentionally so because there was something wrong with Kittim’s skin. Bowen didn’t know precisely what it was, and he had never worked up the courage to ask, but Kittim’s face was a pinkish-purple color, with wispy clumps of hair attached to the flaking skull. He reminded Bowen of a marabou stork, built to feed on the dead and the dying. His eyes, when he chose to reveal them, were a very dark green, like a cat’s eyes. Beneath the coveralls his body was hard and slim, almost emaciated. His nails were neatly trimmed, and he was clean shaven. He smelled vaguely of meat and Polo aftershave.