By the time Oscar had reached the mezzanine level of the hotel, just after eight o’clock, the tenseness and nervousness had been replaced by the usual icy calm. A dozen or so people were standing in the corridor outside the ballroom entrance, some of them holding drinks. Oscar quickly noted that all of those with drinks had adhesive name tags stuck to their coat lapels. Two men standing at the door seemed to be monitors, and as he passed the open doorway he saw a registration table just inside, where invitations were being checked and name tags issued. No chance of getting inside now, but things might relax a bit later in the evening. Oscar continued down the corridor toward the rest room.
There were two men in the rest room when Oscar entered. He took a place at one of the urinals and waited for the men to leave so that he could enter the closet. Unfortunately for Oscar, however, there was a steady traffic into and out of the rest room. He stood at the same urinal for five minutes, and still there was no opportunity to enter the closet. Oscar was beginning to feel conspicuous. He left the urinal and entered a stall.
Under the stall door he could see enough of the floor to monitor the occupancy of most of the room. After another 20 minutes, however, he began to despair of ever being alone in the rest room, much less being alone with Horowitz. He could not avoid a dark suspicion that everyone at the cocktail party had spent the whole evening beforehand drinking beer.
Finally there were no feet in Oscar’s field of view. He stood up and surveyed the room. A stall door at the far end of the row of stalls was closed, but otherwise the rest room was empty. He strode toward the closet and had his hand on the doorknob when the rest room door banged open behind him again. Damn! He turned around, preparing to resume his post in the stall.
The man walking toward the urinals looked straight at Oscar, and Oscar’s heart paused for a fraction of a second. It was Congressman Stephen Horowitz. Oscar tried not to let his emotion show on his face as he and Horowitz passed one another. How much time would he have before someone else came into the room or the man in the end stall came out? Ten seconds? He would be lucky if he had five seconds. It was now or never.
Oscar spun silently on his heel as Horowitz reached the urinals and began fumbling with his fly. He pulled the garrotte from beneath his jacket, swung the loop down over Horowitz’ head, and yanked the handles apart, all in a single, flowing sequence of motions.
As Horowitz’ hands jerked defensively toward his throat, Oscar applied every ounce of strength he had to the handles. The strangling wire lifted the smaller man clear of the floor, and his feet beat wildly in the air. Without waiting for Horowitz to stop struggling, Oscar jerked savagely backward on the garrotte and heaved him into the nearest stall. Supporting the still thrashing Horowitz with one hand, Oscar latched the stall door just as the rest room door banged open once more. He jammed Horowitz down onto the toilet seat and then sat heavily on top of him. He hoped no one would notice two pairs of feet under the stall door.
Although it seemed much longer, it could not have been more than another ten seconds until Horowitz gave one last, convulsive shudder and then ceased his struggle for air and life. Oscar saw a pool of urine spreading out across the floor of the stall as the man’s bladder emptied. Oscar kept his position for another two or three minutes, then felt for Horowitz’ pulse. There was none. He reached behind the man’s head and with some difficulty released the catch on the garrotte. The cable, which had cut deeply into the flesh of Horowitz’ neck, was dripping blood, and Oscar hastily wiped it dry with a wad of toilet paper.
Sounds of running water were coming from the wash basins, but Oscar could see no feet in the vicinity of his stall. Trying to avoid Horowitz’ urine, he slid under the partition into the adjoining stall, leaving Horowitz slumped back against the wall but still on the toilet seat. Before leaving his own stall Oscar flushed the toilet for effect, then walked toward the basins to wash his hands and check his wig.
While Oscar was standing before the mirror straightening his tie — and surreptitiously pushing the garrotte into a more secure position inside his jacket — two more men entered the rest room. One headed straight for the urinals, but the other surveyed the room as if looking for someone, then took a position against the wall opposite the stalls and folded his arms across his chest. Oscar had never seen the man before, but he knew with certainty that it was Horowitz’ bodyguard.
While drying his hands Oscar noticed that the pool of urine from Horowitz’ stall was spreading visibly onto the tiles beyond the door. As he left the rest room he heard the toilet finally flush in the other occupied stall. Things were about to become interesting.
Turning the corner at the end of the corridor and leaving the partygoers behind him, Oscar glanced quickly at his watch. He had been in the rest room 32 minutes altogether, the last five of them with Horowitz.
VII
Oscar, I want you to meet Harry Keller. He’ll help you with the new affirmative action contract compliance paperwork. He’s our expert. He’s also the only guy I know who’s more of a racist than you are.” Carl grinned as he introduced a large, heavy-set man with dark hair and huge, gnarled hands.
“You must be kidding,” Oscar replied, holding his hand out to the newcomer in Carl’s office anyway. “All of your people in the affirmative action section that I’ve had anything to do with so far are fairies and nigger lovers.”
“Oscar!” Adelaide gasped. Oscar had dropped by Carl’s office primarily to pick up Adelaide, whose car was being repaired, but had taken the opportunity to complain to Carl about a new batch of forms which had been sent to him by the Pentagon.
Harry laughed, and Carl said: “The day after he heard the news about Horowitz last week, Harry was passing out cigars in the office, while everyone else was at half mast.”
“You too?” Oscar directed his question to Carl.
“For the sake of appearance, Oscar, for the sake of appearance. After all, the man was head of the House Armed Services Committee, and all of our paychecks were dependent on him.”
“It was more than appearance for some people around here,” Harry contradicted. “That little creep in my section, McGann, actually got moist eyes and sniffles during the eulogy for Horowitz that came over the public address system Tuesday. When the Secretary got to the place in his speech about how much Horowitz had done to promote racial equality in the armed forces, McGann actually started sobbing. Now there’s a man who really feels for our colored brothers.”
Oscar snapped his fingers in recognition: “McGann! That’s the name of the man who sent me that really prissy letter last year when I didn’t fill in all of the blanks on an affirmative action questionnaire.”
“Sounds like him,” Harry responded. “He likes to go through the answers to those questionnaires with a magnifying glass, trying to sniff out the faintest scent of a bad attitude toward the government’s minority-coddling programs.”
“The man’s just trying to do his job and get ahead,” Carl said. “He knows what it takes to get promoted around here, which is more than can be said for you.
“You know what this guy did?” Carl pointed a thumb at Harry and turned to Oscar. “The FBI was swarming all over the Pentagon last week, because there were so many of our guys at the party where Horowitz was killed. While other people were taking the investigation very seriously and trying their best to answer the FBI’s questions, Harry was breaking everybody in the office up with his jokes about Blacks. Managed to get himself an official reprimand from his section chief.”
Harry’s rejoinder to this was, “Say, Oscar, do you know what the three happiest years of a nigger’s life are?”
“Sorry, I guess I don’t.”
“Second grade.”
Everyone laughed at that, even Adelaide. But then Carl lowered his voice and said, “For Christ’s sake, keep your voice down when you crack your Black jokes in here, Harry. I don’t want a reprimand in my personnel file too.”
“Actually, it’s too late for you now, Carl.
I may as well confess. My real job here is to tell racial jokes and then turn in the names of everyone who laughs. After I make my final report the only White employees who’ll be left around here will be McGann and myself.”
Everyone laughed again.
Oscar and Adelaide ended up giving Harry Keller a ride home in response to his invitation to have dinner with him and his wife while he gave Oscar a crash course in dealing with the Pentagon’s latest forms. Harry’s wife Colleen was a pleasant, relaxed woman of about 40. She seemed not to mind the surprise dinner guests, even though she had just gotten home from work herself.
After dinner they sat drinking coffee and chatting. “How’d someone with your sentiments get involved in the affirmative action program?” Oscar asked Harry.
“Sentiments have nothing to do with it. In the Civil Service you just take what they give you — although the fact that I used to teach sociology at the community college — you know, NVCC — may have led them to select me for the affirmative action section. Sociology professors tend to have that kind of rep. Anyway, for a couple of years before I started working for the Department of Defense I spent all my time on the road, selling broadcast studio equipment and visiting customers, and Colleen and I were apart too much — although it was in that job that I first met her. She works for one of my customers in Washington. So I applied for a Civil Service position, and they stuck me in the contract compliance section at the Pentagon. I still moonlight for my old company, though, but now that work is all by telephone.”
“Why’d you switch from teaching to selling?” Oscar asked.
“Teaching became too hard on my conscience. It just got to the point where I couldn’t tell all the lies and hide all the truths that were demanded of me. You wouldn’t believe the ideological straightjacket everyone teaching social sciences has to wear these days. One word that might offend some hypersensitive minority member, and they’ll heave you out on the road.”
“From what Carl says, you may be back on the road again soon,” Oscar replied. “My experience with those ‘love thy nigger’ types you’re working with now is that they have very little tolerance for anyone who doesn’t share their sick view of the world.”
“Oh, Carl exaggerates Actually, I manage to keep my mouth shut at the office most of the time. It’s just that I was so pleased when that bastard Horowitz got what he deserved that I couldn’t hold myself back.”
“Well, I don’t see how you manage to work at all in that environment. I can understand how someone like Carl puts up with it; he’s the least sentimental guy I’ve known. But it must be very hard on you having to keep your feelings bottled up inside and not being able to do or say anything. People with feelings need to be able to express them.”
“I agree with you completely, Oscar. And I do express myself. Just not at work — or, at least, not as much as I’d like. In addition to my job at the Pentagon and my moonlighting I work for the National League.”
“The National League? I’ve heard something about them — a neo-Nazi group, I believe. Is that right?”
“Depends on what ‘neo-Nazi’ means. That’s one of those labels like ‘fascist’ or ‘liberal’ that people stick on anything they’re opposed to. The news media call us ‘neo-Nazis,’ and that’s undoubtedly where you heard the term. The implications of that to most people are uniforms, swastika banners, and lots of ‘sieg heiling.’ But that’s not us at all. I’ve got nothing against uniforms and banners, but we don’t use ‘em.”
“What sort of things do you do?”
“Anything and everything that will help our cause.”
“Which is?”
Harry thought for a minute, then began slowly: “Our cause is a secure and progressive future for our race. We want a White world some day — a White world that is conscious of itself and its mission; a world governed by eugenic principles; a world in which the goal of families as well as governments is the upward breeding of our race; a cleaner, greener world, with fewer but better people, living closer to Nature; a world in which quality once again rules over quantity, in which people’s lives have purpose, in which beauty and excellence and honor once again have meaning and value.”
Before Oscar could respond Adelaide chimed in, “Harry, you sound just like my grandpa. He’s the racist in our family. He thinks that the whole world went to hell after the Second World War — says that if he’d known then what he knows now, he’d have gone to Germany and volunteered for the Waffen-SS instead of fighting in Roosevelt’s army.”
“You should have spent more time listening to your grandpa, sweetheart,” Oscar said. Then he added, “I like your cause, Harry. You said you do anything and everything to promote it. Can you give me some specifics?”
“Well, at this time most of our effort is educational rather than political. We’re trying to raise people’s consciousness on racial issues, and then to motivate and direct those whose consciousness we do have some effect on. So we publish a lot of materials with a racial message: books, magazines, video tapes. Most of our members are professionals who are able to participate in this effort in one way or another. For example, I translate a lot of German material into English for our publishing department, and I keep the equipment in our video studio working.”
“Harry’s too modest,” Colleen interjected. “He built the video studio from scratch and supplied all of the equipment. Whenever anything is being taped he’s the studio engineer, handling the lighting, the sound, the cameras, and everything else. Then he helps with the editing of the tapes.”
Harry shrugged modestly. “It was a natural assignment for me. After I began selling studio equipment I had to learn something about how it works and how to fix it. When we decided we needed a studio I was able to get my hands on a lot of good, used equipment for the organization for almost nothing.”
Changing the subject, he continued, “Now, Colleen here is a first-class expediter. She works as an assistant general manager for KZR-TV during the week, and on weekends she takes care of the office chores for the League’s Northern Virginia unit: purchasing, bill paying, banking, contacting members for meetings, and all the rest.”
“You said you translate German too. Are your parents from Germany?” Oscar asked. He was a little bothered by the neo-Nazi tag and was looking for a tie-in to images he had in his mind from hundreds of television movies he had seen as a teen-ager: men with cruel faces in black uniforms, the light glinting evilly from their monocles as they barked orders in guttural accents and their subordinates unleashed huge, vicious dogs on frightened Jews. It wasn’t that he believed in the literal reality of those images, but they bothered him nevertheless. Oscar always had been repelled by cruelty, whether to men or animals.
Harry answered Oscar’s question: “Yes and no. They were from what’s called Czechoslovakia today. They were born in Pilsen — a family of instrument makers there for more than a century — and then they lived in Prague until the end of the Second World War. I was born there in 1945. My father and older sisters were lynched by some of Mr. Roosevelt’s boosters among the Czech population, after quite a bit of rather horrible abuse I gather. My mother never could bring herself to tell me all the details, but it gave her nightmares until the end of her life. Anyway, she escaped with me to Germany, and then we came to this country when I was five.”
“So you’re Czech?”
“No, German. Can’t you tell from my name? It’s as German as yours.”
Oscar blushed. He thought of his name as English — and it was. But it also was German, he knew. The only difference was that the English spelled it with a “y” and the Germans with a “j.” It meant “hunter.” He also knew that Keller was a German name, now that he thought about it. And he knew that a German born in Czechoslovakia was no more a Czech than a Jew born in Poland was a Pole or a Swede born in China was a Chinaman. The English and the Germans and the Swedes were all part of the same family, all Germanic, regardless of where they happened to be born, just as Jews wer
e Jews and Chinamen were Chinamen, regardless of their birthplace or country of citizenship.
Those were all things he had figured out for himself years ago. Sometimes, though, if he were not careful, he slipped back into old habits of thought which had been instilled in his mind through years of indoctrination by the schools and the entertainment media. Now, his thinking jogged by Harry’s remark, he realized that all of the nasty connotations of “neo-Nazi” applied to himself as much as they did to Harry. That realization made him uneasy, but at the same time it stimulated his interest in finding out more about Harry and Colleen and the National League.
He took a new tack: “You said your group wants a future for our race which is both secure and progressive. Do you see any contradiction between those two things?”
Harry laughed. “There’s been a lot of argument on that point. It’s clear that over the long haul — that is, over the millions and hundreds of millions of years — progress has been the result of struggle, of hardship, of adversity, of a brutal pruning and weeding of the stock by Nature’s harsh selection; in other words, it’s been the result of a lack of security. Those who are secure stagnate, and those who are insecure struggle and advance.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “races do die out. Sometimes conditions become so insecure that the whole race perishes. Conditions are such now that our race is in danger of perishing, partly because we’re being outbred by other races in the same ecological niche and partly because we’re miscegenating ourselves to death. It’s clear that we are in danger now of too much insecurity.”
“But,” Oscar responded, “we mustn’t abandon the general principle just because it seems to be working against us now. If we can’t cope with the present insecurity and other races can, shouldn’t we conclude that the cause of progress will be better served by their survival than by ours?”
“Of course, not,” Harry responded, a trace of impatience in his voice. “Progress comes when all the competitors in the game struggle for survival, and the most fit wins. Our race isn’t struggling. It’s lying down and dying. Our job is to wake it up. When it’s trying to survive, it’ll whip all the other races with its hands tied behind its back.
Hunter Page 5
