by Todd Borg
Because of Spot’s proclivity for turning all meals into instant meals, I cut his food into pieces to force him to enjoy it longer. He knew what was happening and stared at me the way a starving lion would stare if you took a fresh side of beef and started carving it into little hors d’oeuvres. To exacerbate the situation, I reached for his dog food to provide some dilution and extension.
Spot’s brow furrowed further.
“What’sa matter? All I do is grab the bag o’ beige chunks and you look unhappy.”
Despite my flavor alterations, when I gave the okay, Spot’s performance was appropriate to someone who held a Ph.D. in Instantaneous Eating.
Diamond knocked on my door at 9 p.m. I knew before I answered that it had to be Diamond or Street because Spot made only the smallest of woofs at the knock and began wagging hard as he stared at the solid door.
I let Diamond in. He gave Spot a rough pet, then sat in my rocker.
“Relax your fists,” he said to me.
I looked down and saw that my hands were knotted at my sides. I straightened my fingers. They didn’t uncurl easily.
“Worry and stress ain’t gonna make you find her sooner,” he said.
I told Diamond about the ad, the body, Ramos’s ID of the victim as Davy Halstead, leader of the Red Blood Patriots.
“Ramos would like us to keep the identity quiet for the time being,” I said.
Diamond nodded.
“Got a question about gang tattoos,” I said as I fetched him a beer.
“You remember where I work? Douglas County is ranching country with a resort corner up here at the lake. Not many gangs.”
“Right.” I handed him a beer. “But you’re a smart guy, and you read the trades. So I figured you’d know more about tattoos than I do. The hostage taker had a tattoo on his wrist that looked like two infinity symbols, one stacked above the other.”
“Don’t know much, but I’m guessing it’s not infinity symbols. Probably, you look at it the other way, it’s stylized eights. If so, number tats aren’t what most city gangs use these days. More like country rednecks. Number tats are big in the militia movement.”
“The Red Blood Patriots never got to Douglas County?” I said.
“I hope not.” Diamond reached over to where Spot was lying next to him and gently knocked his knuckles on Spot’s head. Spot lifted his head and opened his mouth to pant. He thumped his tail once on the floor.
“The numbers usually represent letters or the number of words in a saying,” Diamond said. “Eighty-eight is code for Heil Hitler, because H is the eighth letter in the alphabet.”
“How do you know this stuff?”
“It sticks in your mind when you’ve got brown skin because most of these militia groups are about guns and white supremacy. People of color and Jews are the enemy. White power groups want to wipe us out because we are of course inferior, and we are gradually polluting their race.”
“It’s getting better, don’t you think?”
“Some white people would say that. And I’m inclined to agree. But not all others with brown skin think so.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Some militias are just about boys with their guns. But more are about hate. The type who are drawn to those groups liked it when blacks were just property and picked the boss man’s cotton. But when Lincoln did the Emancipation thing and said that blacks weren’t property anymore, that was upsetting. Then, when the Fourteenth Amendment said that blacks could be citizens, too, that was too much. They’ve been trying to kill them off ever since.”
“You were born in Mexico City and became a naturalized citizen. How do you fit in?”
“Brown skin. Practically a brother in the eyes of the Nazis.”
“Maybe the militia boys are just insecure,” I said.
Diamond nodded. “Ever since Jesse Owens kicked those blond German butts in the thirty-six Olympics.” He upended his beer, swallowed hard. “’Course, there are Hispanic gangs and black gangs that also use number tats, but they are few and hugely less powerful than the militia movement.”
“You’re pretty facile with this amendment stuff.”
“Had to know it to pass the citizenship exam,” Diamond said.
“Most native-born Americans don’t know it.”
Diamond grunted. “A true patriot would know and defend the principles that this country was built on. Easy to wave a flag and put stickers on your truck. Harder to know and support the bill of rights and the central components of the constitution and the amendments.”
“I looked up the Red Blood Patriots and struck out,” I said. “They must have an oath of secrecy for their members. You got an idea of where I could go for more specifics on militia groups in general?”
“There’s a guy at UNR. Frank Stein. I read about him in the New York Times. Caught my eye, a prof from Reno in the Gray Lady. Anyway, he consults for the ADL. He probably knows more about militias than anyone.”
“What’s the ADL?”
“Anti-Defamation League,” Diamond said.
“Rings a bell. Remind me what they do?”
“Their main focus is fighting discrimination against Jews.”
“No small thing, there,” I said.
“Yeah. Most people of color can track hundreds of years of discrimination among their ancestors. But Jews have been hounded for thousands of years.”
“I’ll look him up. Thanks.”
It was late, and Spot and I walked Diamond out to the Green Flame, his beautiful old Karmann Ghia.
“Not on duty,” I said.
“You think I would drink beer on duty?”
“How come you’re up on this mountain if you’re not on duty?”
“A friend calls and leaves a message. I knock on his door when I’m off duty. Something wrong with that?”
“No, Diamond. Something’s very right with that. Thanks.”
“Welcome.” Diamond got in the car. Rolled down the window, his arm making fast little circles with the hand crank.
Spot took a step forward, his head even with the top of the car’s window.
“Anyway, I just came to visit your hound,” Diamond said, reaching up to pet Spot.
“I knew that,” I said.
THIRTY
The next morning I looked up Frank Stein at the University of Nevada Reno. He taught Political Science. I called and found out that he had just left his office to head across campus to give a lecture and would be out of class at 10:50. Just enough time to meet him.
I took Spot and drove up and over Spooner Summit, cruised with a tailwind down the winding 3000-foot descent to the valley and caught the new freeway bypass around Carson City. Reno was only 30 minutes north on 395. Some kind of weather system was pushing through and making strong wind gusts. The Nevada Highway Department had turned on the No-Trailors-Or-Campers sign in Washoe Valley. I cruised on past the exit where the larger vehicles had to turn off to follow the wind-sheltered two-lane road that hugged the mountains to the west. I took the freeway slowly as the wind rocked the Jeep.
As I came over the rise below Slide Mountain and the Mt. Rose Ski Resort, Reno sparkled clear in the bright fall sun, all traces of smog blown east toward the desert. I went west on 80, took the North Virginia exit and crawled around the UNR campus looking for a parking place. Everything was taken. I finally found a lot with a single open space, and I parked beneath a blue sign that warned that if I didn’t have the appropriate windshield sticker, my car would be towed.
I got out and turned to Spot, who had his head out the rear window on the driver’s side. “If the tow truck comes, be nice, and maybe the driver will give you to a good home.” I put his head in an arm lock and gave him a knuckle rub. He wagged.
I asked three different students for the hall where Stein taught. All three of them had to dial down the music in their ears and ask me to repeat the question. They each gave me a different answer. I eventually found a sign with a campus map. A man I guessed to be
Stein was walking out of the lecture hall as I approached.
Stein was a stooped man in his seventies. He wore a snappy-looking watchman’s cap made of plaid wool that went with his tweed sport jacket and wool pants. Beneath the cap was salt-and-pepper hair that seemed to grow in tufts and patches and appeared to not enjoy the attention of a barber. His eyebrows were huge gray caterpillars that looked about to crawl off his face. Smaller, fuzzy creatures lurked inside his ears and nose.
I introduced myself and told him I was working on a case involving a suspect with a distinctive tattoo. “I was given your name, Professor Stein, by a law enforcement officer who said you were an expert on gang and militia tattoos.”
He snorted and kept walking. “Expert, no. Outraged elder, yes.”
I recognized that he fit a certain type, so I played into it. “You think this country is going to the dogs?”
“This country has decided that kids are not the critical trustees of the future but merely an inconvenience to be parked in front of the TV, or a video game, or Facebook, and fed fast food.”
Stein gestured toward a group of kids on Virginia Street who seemed unlikely candidates for high school graduation, much less a university education. The boys wore their jeans falling off their butts, cuffs dragging in the dirt. The girls wore skin-tight, low-cut tops that showed lots of cleavage and belly rolls, and low-cut pants that revealed their thongs.
Stein huffed. “Now we’re enjoying the benefits of an entire generation whose idea of nutrition is high-fructose corn syrup, whose idea of education is survival reality shows, whose idea of entertainment is gross-out YouTube videos that show people in eating and farting and vomiting contests.” Stein knocked his elbow onto my arm just in case I wasn’t paying attention. “What happened to eating your vegetables and reading books?” he said. He was speeding up, his energy output in direct relationship to his emotional temperature.
“What happened to ambition and yearning and intelligent pursuits?” he said. “For thousands of years, people have tried to create an intelligent society, to make us a better species. We celebrated a liberal arts education and studied the classics in literature and art and music and philosophy. Now it’s only taken twenty or thirty years to devolve into a society of militant ignorance. I’ve got kids in my class who can’t write a single literate sentence. They use this new texting language where letters and numerals substitute for entire words. Either they never use capital letters or they only use capital letters. Used to be, Freshman English was just a bit remedial. Now, Freshman English is fourth grade stuff. I had a kid turn in an essay the other day. Every line was like a list. All nouns. I told the kid that a complete sentence had to have a verb in it. He said, ‘What’s a verb?’”
Stein was now at a near-trot, his breathing a series of short pants. He turned up some stairs and went into another building. I held the door for him.
“These kids in that last class of mine… Will any of them ever go to a library? An art museum? The symphony orchestra? If I mention Archimedes or Pythagoras or Newton or Shakespeare or Mozart or Michelangelo, they have no idea who I’m talking about. Same for Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin. I should be glad they know that Lincoln was a president. But they don’t know what he did or when he did it. They can’t tell me the three branches of our government. They don’t know why any of our past wars were fought. They can’t find Germany or Japan or Korea or Vietnam or Iraq on a map.”
Stein opened a door that said Frank Stein, Ph.D., Political Science. He walked into an office that was crowded with piles of books, on shelves, on his desk, on the floor. He balanced his briefcase on top of one of the piles, sat down on an old desk chair. Stein took several deep breaths, exhaling hard.
“By now you’re wondering if I’m just a frustrated geezer suffering dementia. But I rant because of your question about militia tattoos. These guys are the essence of mindlessness. A charismatic leader who read the Cliff Notes on Mein Kampf tells his followers to engrave their bodies with some asinine racist phrase or an arbitrary set of numerals that are supposed to be code for the phrase. And his minions do it. They don’t know what it means. They don’t understand the history. They don’t have a clue about its implications. But they think it is cool, and it gives them a sense of power and significance. They now have a mark. They’re part of a group. They love feeling that they’re one of the herd. They are cattle, eager to follow somebody, anybody. They are proud not to think for themselves because thinking is geeky-nerdy and very uncool. They don’t see brotherhood in thinking. Brotherhood comes from the tribe. Us against them. Special handshakes and secret symbols. It’s the new hip. And they show it on TV, which anoints it, gives it value.”
He slid a pad of lined paper toward me, tossed a pen onto the pad. “Can you draw the tattoo?”
I attempted the symbol and made a mess of it, scratched it out, tried again. “I don’t remember the specifics well, but the tattoo was like two infinity symbols, one over the other. A friend thought it was eighty-eight turned sideways, a Heil Hitler code.”
Stein turned the pad toward him and looked at it.
“Yes, I think your friend is right. The same old thing keeps going round,” Stein said, his voice suddenly weary. “It started out as a Celtic symbol and then got co-opted by anti-Semitic hate groups. We’ve studied this for so long, and it makes less sense than ever.” Stein opened his file drawer, pulled out a bottle of water and drank from it as if he’d been dying of thirst.
“Do you know that we did a survey of anti-Semitic militia group members, and a majority of them can’t tell you the reason they hate Jews? Can you believe it?” Stein stared at me. “They hate us, but they can’t articulate why. They don’t offer up religious reasons. They don’t cite any historical precedents. They don’t even know what Hitler said about us. You’d think that they would try to find something to legitimize their hate.”
“But that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?” I said.
“I don’t mean that they could find justification in the common sense use of the word. I mean that they could find august people and institutions that promoted anti-Semitism. Then the militias could at least cite them in their motivation for hating Jews.”
“What august person or institution, as you say, would promote hating Jews?”
Stein shook his head at me.
“How many years should I go back? Of course there are the multitude of obvious events, bookended by the First Crusade on one side and the Holocaust on the other, events sanctioned by both church and government. But I’m thinking more about people like Martin Luther who wrote in the sixteenth century that Jews who didn’t convert to Christianity should be murdered. I’m thinking about the Catholic Church, which, as recently as the early twentieth century, allowed that while hating Jews as people was a bad kind of anti-Semitism, hating Jews as successful businessmen was fine. They called that a good kind of anti-Semitism, and they promoted it, wrote about it in church publications.” Stein finished his water, then held the plastic bottle up at eye level and crushed it in his fist.
“But the militia members could care less about historical precedent. They just hate without reasons because they’re hard-wired to find someone to be the fall-guy for whatever is wrong in the world. Their leader says that Jews should be annihilated, and the rank and file say, ‘Where do we sign up?’ It fills their need for an us-against-them world view. So they dehumanize and persecute some other tribe, which helps define their own tribe.
“The person who has done this most effectively in our local area is a man named David Halstead. He started a group called the Red Blood Patriots. Right over the Sierra Crest down in the foothills between Placerville and Auburn. Their mission, like that of so many militias, is to overthrow our government and, in the process, round up all people of color and, especially, all Jews. What Davy Halstead has told his followers is that Jews are the people behind the government conspiracy to take away all guns and seize all private property. Halstead is a truly hate
ful guy. He should be…” Stein trailed off and looked out the window. There was a group of young women on the lawn, all holding actual textbooks, an animated study group. But I don’t think Stein noticed.
“Davy Halstead was found dead yesterday morning,” I said.
Stein jerked his head back toward me. “How’d he die?”
“He was murdered.”
I watched Stein carefully. It wasn’t much of a reach to imagine him deciding to enact a little frontier justice of his own. But I couldn’t see it even if he had the strength to put a stake through Halstead’s chest.
“Probably mutiny within the ranks,” Stein said. “These boys live in an atmosphere of violence. If they have a dispute, their rule is violence before discussion.”
“Did you know of a man named Nick O’Connell?” I asked.
“Just heard of him recently from a guy I know in law enforcement. O’Connell was a recent recruit to Halstead’s group who drowned during the hijacking up at the lake. Apparently, he was the hijacker. I did a little research on him to get a sense of his influence in the militia world and see if he warranted further study.”
“You sound very thorough,” I said.
“That’s my self-appointed job. The Anti-Defamation League is a good organization that has lots of scruples about doing things the right way. I make contributions to their work, but I do it from the side. My way. The Frank Stein research institute. I don’t want anyone – and I think the ADL agrees – to think that I’m an ADL mouthpiece or spokesperson.
“So I study guys like Nick O’Connell. I read their writings, watch their YouTube videos, peer into their brains, learn about their hate. I have lots of resources, and I’ve developed a few informants. You’d be surprised what you can learn with a hundred bucks. I’ve become quite a proficient researcher online. I know the websites where these guys post their diatribes.”