The Washington Decree

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  But what confused T. Perkins the most were the statements coming out of the White House pressroom every day. Apparently, the people in the White House did as they pleased. Of course there was massive resistance in both chambers of Congress, but now the country was in the highest state of alert, and FEMA was all-powerful. There were plenty of executive orders to choose from. The Constitution was doing time in the doghouse, thought T. And the implications were far-reaching.

  The president had declared he was going to disarm America and empty the prisons at the same time. All sentences were to be converted to community service and the prisons used for other purposes. Big, tough prison guards would become babysitters; they were to serve as pedagogues for habitual criminals and sick bastards who flipped out over a pair of bare tits or a nose that curved the wrong way. How were prison officers who’d made their living by giving orders and commanding respect with a bristling key ring and nightstick at their belt supposed to suddenly sit down and figure out a work plan for a brain-dead convict? And how was one supposed to punish the multitude of idiots who were running around now, using one another for target practice with banned ammunition? How was one to punish them, when they’d be released so quicky again, anyway? T didn’t understand it, and he wasn’t alone. There were all the Republicans, plus NRA lovers, members of Congress, and the lobbyists, to name a few. But what the hell difference did it make whether they understood or not? No one had any say in the matter as long as the president, the National Security Council, Homeland Security—and thereby also FEMA—agreed and had control over the generals so the National Guard and military could keep the country in a vise of emergency laws. There were already convoys of combat-ready troops patrolling the roads and highways every couple of hours.

  He’d called Doggie Rogers to try and find out what to expect, but she knew nothing. She worked every single day, all day long, just fifty yards from the president of the United States, yet she knew nothing.

  And now they were in the process of filling their jail like never before. The mere six cells he had at his disposal were loaded to the brim long ago. This, too, led to problems. Big, black Benni had ended up in the same cell with big, white Les Tanner, and they’d knocked each other’s teeth out and bloodied up the floor so much that the eccentric, old cleaning lady was sure to have a fit. And as if that weren’t enough, they’d forgotten a drunk in the shack behind the jail, and now he’d gone and shit and thrown up all over the place. The local volunteer fire department that used the room to store some of their equipment would lynch him.

  This was fucking getting out of hand. Now they also had to find room for three more unruly kids who’d felt they needed to prove they still had ammunition and dared to use it.

  Pretty soon only the broom closet would be left.

  The telephone rang on T. Perkins’s desk, and he shoved his hat back.

  “Yeah?”

  “Chief, you’ve gotta come out here. I’m at Jim Wahlers’s place. You’re not gonna believe your own eyes!”

  * * *

  —

  Jim Wahlers was an inoffensive guy who most people didn’t have much to say about other than he was the town’s undertaker and had three first-rate daughters and a wife who didn’t mind telling them if the vegetables weren’t fresh in Walmart. A sociable guy who looked after his job and had never bothered anyone.

  His house was enormous—death being good, constant business—and it had been home to three generations of undertakers, so far. There was a vegetable garden, a two-car garage, and a two-hundred- square-yard cellar with a pool table and dartboard. T. Perkins had often been down there in his younger days when he was the town’s dart champ, and Jim had been almost as good. It had been a nice cellar to practice in.

  And here he stood again, as he did then, with his set of darts in his shirt pocket. He recognized the brown-painted stairs, the paneling they’d so often leaned up against with beers in their hands, the fine network of water pipes that branched off along the ceiling.

  But then came everything he didn’t recognize.

  His men nodded and shrugged their shoulders when they saw his jaw drop. They’d just been through that same reaction.

  All the walls’ surfaces had been redecorated since the time when they were covered with movie posters and the Virginia state flag. There were still posters, but they were new ones, not from horror movies with rubber masks and screaming teenagers. No more sensual lip contact with Ingrid Bergman and Veronica Lake. No, this was clearly something else. T had never known that there were so many militia groups in the country that engaged in activities such as printing up posters like the ones stuck up on Jim Wahlers’s cellar walls. He’d actually had no idea there were so many militia groups, period. The White-Headed Eagles, the Bunker Group from Texas, Ohio’s First National Pioneers, and dozens of others like them. Hanging side by side, these recruitment posters were a fashion show of unintentionally comical uniforms, camouflage makeup smeared across bare skin, displays of huge hand weapons, and big, confident smiles inspired by the ardor of self-righteousness and the need to demonstrate who wore the pants in the family.

  “And look back here!” called his deputy.

  T. Perkins went into the room where they’d once planted their manhood in a pair of older redheaded sisters. He stood looking at forty to fifty cartons. Each carton contained thirty-six boxes of two hundred cartridges each. A little quick figuring, and that made more than three hundred thousand rounds of ammunition.

  “What have you done with Jim?”

  “He’s sitting in his bedroom, holding his wife’s hand. He won’t move. He says we have to leave, that we have no business here. That he hasn’t done anything.”

  T. Perkins looked at the three weapon cabinets. “He hasn’t, strictly speaking, has he?”

  “He bought the ammunition yesterday. It must have cost a fortune.”

  “Did you get the keys from him?” He nodded towards the cabinets.

  “Here they are!” Dody Hall attempted to crowd into the room. She’d been the latest addition to the sheriff’s department.

  He unlocked the cabinets and threw the doors open. Either Jim Wahlers’s funeral business was more profitable than he’d imagined, or else he had some like-minded associates.

  “Wow!” said Dody Hall.

  There were enough semiautomatic guns and rifles to arm at least three hundred men. But that wasn’t the worst thing. What was worse were the hand grenades. T had seen what they could do during a training session for some soldiers in Richmond. If one of them were used against a human being, Jim Wahlers could forget all about traditional funerals.

  CHAPTER 13

  New York City was in a nasty mood, and Rosalie Lee was scared.

  Down in the subways, there were only two topics of conversation. One was President Jansen’s law-and-order program that was coming to be known as the Washington Decree; the other was the sniper killings. But as soon as people were aboveground, they forgot all about President Jansen and his decree. The risk of their own sudden, random death took precedence, and it was only “The Killer on the Roof” that mattered. A bullet had taken the life of a little boy the day before as he walked along the street, holding his mother’s hand, and the day before it had been a lady just like Rosalie. The woman’s little stroll down 14th Street had proved fatal, but it sold newspapers. From the front-page pictures it was obvious she’d been in the process of buying fruit from a street market. Bananas and oranges littered the sidewalk, and her white T-shirt was splattered with blood as she lay there, her brown grocery bag crushed under her heavy body.

  Rosalie hated the trip to her office downtown. She hated creeping along, as close to the walls of buildings as possible, and she hated glancing involuntarily at the rooftops all the time. She was frightened to death at the thought of the pain, the thought of the bullet boring its way into her body and knocking her to the ground.

  B
y now the killer had twenty-one people’s lives on his conscience, at least one a day. By now everyone knew someone who knew someone who knew one of the victims. She herself had met a man whose wife’s nephew had been shot right in the temple and left half his cranium at the corner of East 59th Street and First Avenue. On the news, they said the killer had been sitting on the aerial cable car to Roosevelt Island, but it wasn’t true. There was no lack of theories and speculation, but in the meantime he kept holding all the cards.

  Each night Rosalie prayed they’d find him, that he wasn’t black, and that her three sons would come home safe and sound. She feared what else could befall her boys on the streets of New York these days. And it wasn’t only New York that had its hands full. Demonstrations in Chicago had been met with water cannons, and at night the National Guard were shooting rubber bullets at people who gathered on street corners. Roadblocks had been set up across the country, train and air traffic was being minutely monitored, and some bus routes had been temporarily shut down.

  The country had been turned upside down.

  * * *

  —

  Moonie Quale had raised the stakes ten days previously when he called together the leaders of the country’s most rabid militias, continuously spreading his poisonous propaganda through a much-too- eager media at the same time. People in camouflage uniforms from every corner of the country had expressed their support for the perpetrators of the Madison bombing, after which they declared war on the government. They’d all reached the same conclusion: It was time to respond to the Jansen administration’s abuse of power. The murdering of congressmen and local federal officials began immediately. The first night elicited a series of bombings and assassinations, and the next morning the nation’s streets were full of police. The bombings continued throughout the day, and all levels of the judicial and defense systems were put on high alert.

  Rosalie was sitting in her comfy green easy chair when President Jansen broke into a TV program to decree that the country was in a state of emergency. His face was so dark with anger that his voice trembled as he spoke. After that, things moved fast. In the course of twenty-four hours Congress was effectively emasculated, and emergency executive powers and presidential decrees became the order of the day. On the first evening more than half the land’s newspapers and TV channels were temporarily shut down in accordance with Executive Order 10995.

  The journalists’ union could protest all it liked, and political groups on all levels, too, for that matter. Jansen’s Washington Decree and FEMA’s control of the situation were real life now, whether people liked it or not.

  * * *

  —

  After that, life was tougher for everyone, not least of all in New York. Rosalie lived with her three small-time delinquent sons—plus five thousand other people—all within the radius of a couple of hundred yards, for whom justice depended on keeping a sharp blade or loaded piece in your back pocket. Here the illusion of law and order had evaporated ages ago; one had to survive as best one could. It was hard being a “law-abiding citizen” in the South Bronx, with or without a state of emergency. There was no doubt about that.

  Rosalie’s boys—James, Frank, and Dennis—had a lot in common: two-and-a-half-years age difference between the oldest and the youngest, each one physically fit and irresistible to the opposite sex, and all quick to talk back with their mouths as well as their fists. The others called them Huey, Louie, and Dewey—but not within earshot. These were three dudes who demanded respect and wasted no time in seeing to it they got it. She had tried to instill in them God’s words about turning the other cheek and loving one’s neighbor, but they weren’t fast learners in this respect, which worried their mother. They were pretty touchy and slapped people around on the slightest pretense. None of them had been in jail yet, but now it seemed just a matter of time—if they lived that long.

  Rosalie dared not follow this train of thought to its conclusion. Several of her girlfriends had lost sons; one had lost two. She loved her sons dearly, in spite of their glaring shortcomings. She tried to picture them, graying at the temples, her anchor and protectors when she reached old age. Rosalie’s most fervent wish was for them to get out of the ghetto, and therefore she wasn’t one of those who immediately condemned Jansen and his decree. Her sons did, of course, but not she. The way things had gotten in the United States, there was a chance the decree might help. Help make it possible to walk the streets unafraid, without having to step around society’s human discards, without having to see people with no hope of redemption. Without having to watch drugs course through families’ lives and their children’s veins.

  Rosalie wanted so very much for her boys to listen to her, for them to avoid the consequences of the president’s law-and-order campaign. That they avoid getting picked up bearing loaded weapons and stop taking dumb risks.

  The Washington Decree had pulled American society up by the roots. People were returning from the prisons, most of them with money in their pockets and a brand-new job that consisted of keeping the neighborhood’s youth out of trouble. Skeptical liberal elements had analyzed the situation from every possible angle, while the Republicans in Congress—and by now also a large portion of the Democrats—were screaming themselves blue in the face over what they saw as a case of letting foxes guard the chicken coop. But Rosalie Lee saw it altogether differently. These adolescent ex-cons weren’t interested in landing back behind bars, and now they had something useful to do with their lives. Their parole officers were no longer their judges but their peers. They had the same goals, more or less the same pay, and they spoke the same language. Their job basically consisted of making the best out of practically nothing. Like getting the boys from the Latino gangs and the black brotherhoods to give up their weapons, getting them out of the alleys and into detox clinics.

  Each of those released from prison was given five boys from different street gangs to supervise. Kids who had previously been enemies were forced to behave together, else they could expect a whupping. They did things where they had fun and laughed together, and occasionally learned something. They checked out Wall Street and got free tickets to the movies—stuff like that.

  Gang members still dissed other gang members when they were back on their home turf, but now violence rarely escalated beyond the stage of rhetoric. Somehow it didn’t feel right, beating someone up who you’d spent the afternoon having a good time with. There were still ugly episodes, but they were fewer and fewer. In some strange way it was like there was a new kind of solidarity in the neighborhoods, and the streets brought people together instead of dividing them.

  In any case, Rosalie Lee was beginning to feel more secure in Throgs Neck than around Manhattan, the favorite haunt of the sniper.

  Then her second-born son, Frank, came home one evening, wide-eyed, on crack, and in a vindictive rage after having been shot in the calf. The scene changed instantly. James, Frank, and Dennis quickly collected all the ammunition they had hidden around the apartment that their mother hadn’t succeeded in searching out herself. Then they loaded their weapons and took off on a punishment expedition. Rosalie never found out what happened later, but three black kids were killed in the Bronx in the course of that night. She didn’t really want to know more.

  She was sick with dread, however, and confiscated the boys’ guns while they slept. She took them down to Eastchester Bay and threw them as far out into the water as her heavy arms would allow. She listened to the boys’ police radio for a couple of hours, and when no mention was made of any suspects in the Bronx killings, she decided to keep her fears and suspicions to herself.

  That night she didn’t sleep a wink. She repeatedly climbed out of bed, got down on her knees, and prayed. “Dear God,” she whispered, “please spare my boys!”

  * * *

  —

  Since Rosalie was born—three blocks away, forty-eight years ago—she’d been out of New York City on
ly two times in her life. Once when she visited her sister in Virginia and was on the quiz show, the other the trip to China. Both occasions had been like gifts from heaven, but both times she’d thanked the Lord for being able to come back to the streets of the Bronx—these obscure clefts that crisscrossed mile after mile of dismal apartment blocks. Here her soul found respite; here was her world. In any case that’s how it had been till the night her boys went out on their mission of vengeance. Now she wished they were all somewhere else, far away in the countryside.

  She crossed herself and called out Jesus’s name. Now her boys had possibly taken a life. Did that mean they were on their way into the abyss, just like thousands of souls before them who lived in the South Bronx? The consequences would be fatal if they were caught and found guilty. According to Jansen’s decree, clemency was to be shown only for old offenses, not new ones, and definitely not ones involving homicide. A petty criminal could get off with a rehabilitation program and some months’ community service, but not murderers—of course not. Short work was made of this kind of human garbage. It was the death sentence for them—end of story.

  Eleven people had already been executed in Texas alone since the state of emergency had been declared. The condemned were executed around the country wherever there were proper facilities, and the process was sped up as well. Vice President Sunderland had declared that all death rows would be empty by autumn. That was one a day, he figured—at least. This now often entailed taking prisoners straight from death row to the execution chamber without a last visit from loved ones, without a last phone call, and without a last couple of hours’ chance for quiet reflection—all of which used to be considered a condemned prisoner’s unalienable right. But this was how it was now, no matter how loud the angry chorus of protest from countless organizations, citizens, politicians, the media, and even foreign governments. If you killed someone after March 12, 2009, you were executed. Simple as that. There was no provision for a pardon. Habeas Corpus—indeed, the Bill of Rights—had been invalidated.