“How about one straight answer. Are you or are you not involved in the cocaine-smuggling business?”
“I have never smuggled cocaine.”
“Do you really have a net worth of four billion American dollars?”
“I am a wealthy man. I do not know just how wealthy.”
“At last, a straight answer.”
Aldana’s upper lip curled into a sneer and his eyes narrowed. His gaze locked on the journalist, he rose from the chair. As the marshals led him through the door that led back to his cell, he kept his eyes on Mergenthaler until the door cut off his view.
“He’s crazy as a bedbug,” Yocke said in the car.
Ottmar Mergenthaler sat motionless behind the wheel, the ignition key in his hand. “Too bad Geraldo Rivera missed this one.”
“He didn’t scare you with that staring act, did he?”
Mergenthaler glanced at the younger man. “Yeah. He did.”
The columnist examined the key and carefully placed it in the ignition switch. “He’s insane and has armies of hired killers that have murdered hundreds of politicians, judges, and police in Colombia. They’ve blown up airliners, bombed department stores and newspapers, and assassinated dozens of journalists who refused to be quiet. They don’t care who they kill. They truly don’t.”
The columnist started the car and engaged the transmission. “Yeah, Jack, that man scared me.”
CHAPTER FIVE
An American’s enthusiasm for law and order is directly proportional to the degree to which he believes his personal safety or his livelihood is threatened. When the perceived threat recedes, so does his willingness to be policed.
America is the most underpoliced nation on earth. The average American spends his life without any but casual contact with policemen — except for the ubiquitous traffic cops enforcing ridiculously low speed limits that Americans insist are necessary and yet almost universally ignore. Many law-abiding citizens have never in their lives spoken to a policeman, and the vast majority have never suffered the indignity of contact with policemen performing their duty.
No paramilitary police patrol American streets. No secret police monitor telephone conversations or scrutinize mail or hire neighbors to tattle. No policeman calls an American to account for slandering the government or the president or writing scurrilous letters to editors or politicians.
Regardless of the degree of his paranoia or hatred, an American will be left undisturbed unless and until his conduct crosses the threshold into violence, in which case he can expect to reside in a cell for a relatively short time, there to contemplate the error of his ways. No firing squad. No political prison. No gulag. Though he be mad as a March hare, no permanent commitment to an insane asylum. In America a man’s right to hate his neighbor is protected as it is nowhere else on earth.
In spite of repeated influxes of immigrants from every hate-soaked, war-torn corner of the earth, America has institutionalized personal freedom. The courts have zealously fostered it, perhaps unintentionally, by acting vigorously and self-righteously on the oft-stated and highly dubious assumption that for every wrong there is a remedy. Not a remedy in the next life, but here, in America. Now! Never in all of the tragic, bloody course of human history has such a radical, illogical concept been routinely accepted and acted upon by so many supposedly rational beings.
So the social fabric remains intact. No group of any size sincerely believes no one will listen to its grievance. Everyone will listen. Newspapers will spill ink, the idle sympathize and donate money, politicians orate, judges fashion a remedy.
And America will go on.
Jack Yocke stared at the words on the screen as he worried a fingernail. This was America as he saw it, a deliciously mad, pragmatic place. Americans want justice, but not too much. They want order, but not too much. They want laws, but not too many. Now, into this cauldron of free spirits had been introduced Chano Aldana and his four billion dollars.
$4,000,000,000. The amount of murder, mayhem, treachery, and treason that four billion dollars would buy was almost beyond comprehension. And Aldana was just the man to make the purchase. What did he care if the foundations cracked and the house came down? He had his. And he had served notice.
“Your style is atrocious.” Ott Megenthaler was reading over his shoulder.
“Not right for the Post, eh?”
“Definitely not.”
“Aldana can’t win.”
“You know it and I know it, but apparently he doesn’t.”
“A little licentiousness, Americans enjoy that. A little illicit pleasure to apologize for on Sunday morning, what’s the harm? But Aldana will sooner or later be crushed like a gnat if he tries to intimidate people here like he did in Colombia.”
“No doubt Liarakos tried to tell him that.”
“His best defense is to play the underdog. David versus Goliath.”
“Chano Aldana is Goliath,” the columnist said dryly and pulled a nearby chair around. “He made that pretty plain this afternoon.”
“We’re going to have to legalize dope, Ott. Right now nobody wants to make it legal, yet nobody wants to live in an America that is so well policed that it can’t be sold.”
“If more-efficient police are what it takes, I’m for it,” Mergenthaler said.
“Aww, bullshit. You haven’t thought this through. You despised J. Edgar Hoover. You thought the House Un-American Activities Committee was a cancer on the body politic.” When Mergenthaler tried to reply, Yocke raised his voice and overrode him. “I’ve read some of your old columns. Don’t try to change your spots now.”
After making sure Yocke had really shut up, Mergenthaler said, “I’ve been to Holland and seen the kids lying in the public squares, whacked out on hash, scrambling their brains permanently while the police stand and watch, while the world walks around them. I’ve been to the Dutch morgues and seen the bodies. I’ve been to the D.C. morgue and seen the bodies there too. This shit ain’t tobacco and it ain’t liquor. Two crack joints will make an average person an addict. Legalize it? No! A thousand times no.”
Jack Yocke threw up his hands. “Medellín had four thousand and fifteen murder victims delivered to the morgue in 1989. Those were the bodies they found. Medellín has a population of two million. That’s a murder rate of over two hundred per hundred thousand people.” Yocke’s eyes narrowed. “Our rate here in the District is around eighteen or nineteen. That’s four hundred and thirty-eight murders in 1989. When our murder rate is ten times worse than it is now, Ott—ten times worse—then I’ll ask you how much sympathy you feel for all those addicts who knew better and took their first puff anyway.”
“It won’t get that bad here.”
“You think the black militants and liberals who run this town are gonna fix things? You met Aldana this afternoon. Like hell it won’t get that bad!”
“Didn’t you just say that Aldana would get his sooner or later?”
“It isn’t Aldana I’m worried about. It’s all the other flies that kind of money will attract.”
When Mergenthaler left and went back to his office, Jack Yocke tried to write some more and found he couldn’t. He was fuming, irritable. His eye fell on the front page of today’s paper with its photo of George Bush sailing off Kennebunkport, Maine. Bush was waving, wearing a wide grin. Jack Yocke threw the paper into the wastepaper basket.
Rock Creek Park is Washington’s attempt at Central Park. Unlike that vast expanse of trees and grass in New York City, Rock Creek Park is not a pedestrian’s paradise. Part of the reason is geography.