"They sent the colonel," Smith said, "and they did it beautifully. We thought they weren't interested in the Mueller device at all, but they were. But now, our intercepts tell us they found something better. Two instruments that are better and more important than the Mueller thing."
"So now I'm not just looking for the device that the Mueller family had, but I'm looking for a Colonel Speskaya and two new weapons he's got his hands on?"
"Yes. Precisely," said Smith.
"Smitty. This job isn't worth spit." Remo happily hung up the phone. When it rang again, he tore it out of the socket. When a bellboy came up to check the phone out of order, Remo gave him fifty dollars and told him to leave the suite of rooms alone. When the assistant manager came up and insisted a phone be reinstalled, Remo allowed as how life was hard and he wanted to get some sleep and if he were bothered again, he would install the phone in the assistant manager's face.
The suite was not bothered again that night. Remo locked Tyrone Walker in the bathroom. With some newspapers on the floor.
CHAPTER SIX
The Reverend Josiah Wadson let his booming voice resonate out over the auditorium in the Bronx. Outside long lines of moving vans were parked, their engines stilled, their carriers locked. They had distant license plates, from Delaware, Ohio, Minnesota, Wyoming, but each had fresh canvas signs: "Affirmative Housing II, Rev. J. Wadson, Executive Director."
Inside the auditorium, elderly white people sat listening to the reverend. Box lunches of fried chicken and rich dripping ribs, with crusty white bread, had been passed out and they drank milk and coffee and soft drinks.
"I prefer tea and toast," said one woman with a twang that crackled with age. She wore a delicate sapphire ring with small diamond baguettes set in white gold, the sort of tiny delicacy of a world even older than hers. She smiled and said please, because all her life she had always said please. She could not remember not saying it.
Nor would she ever fail to say thank you. It was a just and proper thing. People should treat each other with respect, which was why she was here today from Troy, Ohio.
There were good and bad in all races and if whites were needed so that all men could be equal, then, like her great-grandfather who fought to end slavery, so would she volunteer herself. And the government was being very generous. They would pay half her rent for a year. It was called Affirmative Housing II, and Rebecca Buell Hotchkiss of Troy, Ohio looked forward to what she had told her friends was a new challenge.
She was going to meet a whole new world of friends of different-colored skin. If they were half as nice as Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, her close black friends in Troy, why then she had just stumbled into a windfall. When she thought of New York City she thought of all the shows she could see. All the museums she could visit.
Why, they had television in New York City on almost all the channels. And the Botanical Gardens and the Bronx Zoo were within just a few miles of where she would be living. Her furniture was outside in one of the vans and here were other nice people from all over America, going to show that America believed in brotherhood. What could go wrong? Josiah Wadson was a reverend and he was directing this lovely people program.
So she asked, with a very big please, for tea and toast. She did not like ribs and chicken. It was too harsh for her queasy stomach.
She asked this of one of the nice young men. She thought all the people she had met were nice. And she refused to believe there was anything evil about the reverend wearing a pistol. After all, there were many racists around and as a little girl she knew how hard it could be on Negro men at that time. Whooops. Black. She would have to learn that was the nice thing to call them now. Whooops. You did not refer to blacks as "them." She was learning.
She was surprised when she was refused tea and toast.
"You don' like ribs and chicken 'cause 'you a racist," said the young man. He looked at her hand the way other young men used to look at her bosom. It was the hand with the ring her grandmother had given her.
"I used to love southern food," said Miss Hotchkiss, "but now I have a queasy stomach."
This small commotion was heard on the stage of the auditorium by Reverend Wadson. He had his pistol buttoned under his black jacket. He wanted to know what the trouble was down there. The young man told him.
"Well, let her have tea and toast. If she wants to deny the rich black heritage being offered her for her pale white tea and toast, let her. We on to an enrichment program for whites."
Wadson grinned a big licorice happiness as the auditorium returned him polite applause.
"De white man, he need to complicate thing. It 'bout time, we moralize him. We fight complication wif clarity. Evil wif morality. We give de white oppressor a moral standard he never know."
The whites applauded with alacrity but not with enthusiasm. The applause came and went like a dutiful blast from a pistol shot. Loud and short.
"Affirmative Housing Two, it simple. No need to muggy up wif high-falutiness. It simple as grits. Housin', it segregated. Segregation, it against de law. All of you be criminals. Till now. Now, you be paid to follow de law of de land. Law, it say you gotta live wif nigg… with blacks," and on this note, Reverend Wadson bellowed into glorious resonance.
"How looong, Oh Lawd, de black man gotta do de integrating? How long, oh Lawd, de black man he gotta go integrating? No longer, Lawd. Lawd, ah gots good news for you now. At long last, ah gots good news for yo' bleedin' heart. Black consciousness and black pride bring de oppressor 'round to do what legal and right. Whites, dey gonna do de integrating."
And with a cautionary note to the ruler of the universe that the whites had to be offered moving money to move into black neighborhoods, the Reverend Wadson concluded by asking a blessing on getting whites to do what they should have done from the beginning.
Affirmative Housing II was quite simply integration of neighborhoods using whites instead of blacks as the integrators, and black neighborhoods instead of white ones as the areas to be integrated. It was an experimental pilot project of Rev. Wadson's Black Ministry Council, funded by the federal government. There was six million dollars for the project. Urban economists call the grant "so little they don't want it to work."
Of the six million dollars, two million went for consulting fees, one million for the moving, two million for exploratory research and nine hundred thousand dollars for "outreach, input, and counterface groupings." The remaining one hundred thousand dollars went to buy two buildings, the owner of which gave Reverend Wadson an envelope with forty thousand dollars in it as a sales commission, sometimes referred to, when indulged in by whites, as a kickback.
The strategy sessions called workshops were conducted at resorts in Trinidad, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cannes, and Paris. There were floods of consultants and consulting firms at one hundred dollars per hour. Many of the finest New York City courtesans found themselves giving advice on interrace counterfaces.
This auditorium was costing American taxpayers forty thousand dollars in consulting fees. Besides Reverend Wadson, there were black authorities and consultants sensitizing the white audience. There was talk on Heritage, which showed blacks were good and whites were bad and how ignoble whites had ruined noble black men. The black speaker had written a review of this book and for five thousand dollars he read his review.
It said he didn't know why the author bothered to give unworthy whites such a worthy book. He blamed whites for not bringing up blacks as Muslims. He said he didn't know why he even bothered to talk to the whites, because nobody else cared for whites. Not in the whole world.