The gallery and litigants stood as the judge left, and a few reporters tried to move to the front of the court. Three very serious federal marshals stopped them four rows back.
Deputy U.S. Attorney Leah Cobb stood motionless, just staring at the empty bench, looking right after a few seconds. “You have no idea what you’ve done, Mankowitz.”
Seymour Mankowitz looked the prosecutor’s way, smiling. His eyes traveled halfway down her slender body. “And you have no idea just how fine an ass you have, Leah.” He ended the retort with a leer that was meant more to anger than to invite. It was enough to motivate her quick departure.
“You’d better get him down to the basement,” a huge marshal suggested to Mankowitz. “The crowd’s already gathering out front.”
“Okay.” He turned to his client. The man was still looking blankly ahead, at nothing in particular. His chest was rising and falling more than Mankowitz had ever noticed. Relief. That had to be it. “John. Let’s go.”
The two men followed a small phalanx of marshals to a service elevator out of view of the press. It took them directly to the restricted area of the basement parking garage.
“He has transport, right?” the big marshal asked Mankowitz.
“I have everything I need,” Barrish told the big African, turning away and walking toward the blue Aerostar waiting with its side door open.
“I tried to tell him it would be better to have some protection leaving here,” Mankowitz told the marshal.
“No skin off my back,” the marshal said, thinking to himself that a lynching by that very large and very dark crowd out front might be very appropriate, considering…
John Barrish climbed into the van and took the middle seat as the door was closed. His wife grabbed him around the neck in a hug that was so tight it was almost painful.
“John. John.” Louise Barrish kissed her husband’s neck and started to cry. “John. You’re coming home.”
John felt the warmth of her tears rolling onto his cheeks. He reached up with both hands, gripped her shoulders, and broke the hold she had on him. “Get off of me!”
Louise fell away as her husband pushed her toward the large tinted window on the van’s left side. Her hands came up to her face, the tears falling upon each trembling finger.
John looked to her with the eyes she remembered. They also contained the look she had wished would be gone. Somehow gone. “This isn’t the time.”
“Pop.” Toby Barrish looked back to his father from the passenger seat, his lazy right eye askew. “You look strong.”
“Always,” John answered, happy more than anything to see his two sons after so long a separation. “Stanley, where are we going?”
The younger Barrish boy adjusted the rearview mirror to see his father. “We have a place.”
A place, obviously provided by his one remaining benefactor. Four walls and a roof. Not a home. That had been taken by the State. Still, it would serve the purpose. A place to eat, to sleep, to think. And to prepare.
“Do we have it yet?” Barrish asked his eldest son.
Toby looked back, smiling. “Freddy picked it up today. I’m gonna get it from him tomorrow.”
“Good,” John said, his head nodding confidently.
Stanley glanced at his father in the mirror as he wound the van up the serpentine driveway to the street. “So we’re going to do it?”
John gave his son a look that caused him to turn away from the reflection of the man who’d given him life. He flashed on the seemingly endless days spent penned in by concrete and steel. “Yes, Stanley. Now more than ever.”
It was eagerness, Toby realized. And anger. His father was a master at harnessing the power of the latter, in himself as much as in others.
“There’s a bunch of niggers out there,” Toby warned his father.
John snapped his head toward his eldest son, which was enough of an admonition.
“Sorry, Pop,” Toby said, knowing exactly what his transgression was. “Africans.” Many people referred to his father as a refined racist because he didn’t run around in a white hood saying “nigger” every time he opened his mouth. But Toby saw no difference in the terms. African. Nigger. Coon. It didn’t matter, though he respected his father too much to challenge his views on the subject. And in due course it would not matter. Soon there would be an America populated by Americans, and what anyone called someone with an excess of skin pigment would be up to them. The Africans would be back banging their drums and taking Swahili names for themselves. The Mexicans would be back in tortilla heaven. The Japs and the towelheads would all go home. America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, would be white, as it was meant to be. Soon. Sooner than anyone could imagine.
“You might want to duck down, Dad,” Stanley suggested. “We’re going out the side but there might be cameras.”
“I’ve got nothing to hide,” John declared.
“Sit tall, Pop,” Toby said as light from the street above washed over the driveway ahead.
“I just thought—”
“You thought wrong, Stan,” Toby said, cutting his brother’s words off.
The Aerostar crested the driveway and pulled through a line of police onto the blocked-off street. Cameras were everywhere, but only a few demonstrators had figured out that the front of the Federal Building might be a symbolically fine place to show their anger, but the object of that anger would be nowhere near it There were some signs, plenty of obscene gestures and shouting, and lines of hypocritical police holding back those with vengeance in their hearts. They would arrest John Barrish for his beliefs, and they would protect him because of the same. It was a duality they would come to regret in very short order.
“I’m glad you’re going to be with us for this, Pop,” Toby admitted. His father had conceived the entire plan some time before, nurturing all the elements until everything was in place. Even his incarceration hadn’t halted the preparations. He had seen to that, seen to everything being able to go ahead without him. Still, he deserved to be part of it. “You get to enjoy it all.”
John Barrish stared straight ahead at downtown traffic, not really smiling, but feeling something beyond pleasure. It was desire. A burning desire that nothing could match. “Not ‘enjoy,’ Toby. Savor.”
It was the closest words could come, but words meant very little now. Talk was no longer cheap in John Barrish’s mind — it was without value. Action was the only measure of expression worth a damn.
They have no idea…
ONE
First Light
You would have thought that the Super Bowl was being played just two miles from 1212 Riverside by the number of satellite trucks lining Avenue B.
“The vultures are out,” Frankie observed as she eased the Bureau Chevy along the crowded roadway.
“They smell flesh,” Art said, regretting his words as they became prophetic. “Damn.”
“You’re the one with the high-profile face,” Frankie said, just before the first mic-wielding reporter reached Art through the passenger-side window.
“You’re Agent Art Jefferson, aren’t you?” a harried female reporter asked. Asked, really, didn’t fully convey the force of her demand.
Well, if they could exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech. Art could use his to push a few buttons. “What is it?” he asked, looking at his watch. “About eleven o’clock? Hey, the news starts in a few minutes. Got anything good?”
The reporter’s face switched from that of a determined professional to that of a teenager in disbelief at the lame comment her parent had just made. “Come on, Jefferson. Give us a statement.”
The “us” had pressed up behind and around her. Cameramen circled to the front of the car and the sides, bathing it in a dazzling glare.