by P. G. Abeles
Typically, men with power were not hanging out in the projects unless they were drug dealers. Success for kids in the projects meant finding a way out—and unless they had a talent for sports—that pretty much meant running drugs. The Guard gave the kids an alternate version of success to aspire to. These guys were tough, they were respected, and they were enforcing the law. It was as if the Lone Ranger had appeared on the South Side of Chicago, and he was black!
Of course, there had been problems. Allegations of abuse and heavy-handedness had surfaced over and over. One suspected drug dealer, who had shown a disinclination to absent himself from the projects, was beaten nearly to death by seven guards with flashlights. The regular police claimed, with some justification, that the Ministry’s forces were responsible for flagrant instances of brutality that would never have been tolerated had they been committed by a municipal police force. However, community outcry was muted. Possibly because the project’s residents saw the Ministry’s forces as being a part of their community, instead of something controlled by outsiders, the residents kept silent. It spoke powerfully to the reason the Chicago P.D. continued to hold so little sway in the community after years of outreach. Harrison hated to admit it, but it was true. The Guard was viewed as an integral part of the community in a way the police never had been. You don’t rat on your own. And you don’t rat on people who are trying to help you.
Lost amid the accusations and finger pointing, Harrison knew, was the harsh reality that the police didn’t want to secure the projects. Chicago housing projects like Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor were war zones. New Year’s was celebrated by hundreds of gang members firing their guns in the air, forcing the police to block off entire neighborhoods whose residents would otherwise be at risk from falling bullets. Balconies intended for the residents’ tomato plants and plastic beach chairs had to be enclosed with steel fencing to keep the residents from disposing of their garbage—or each other—over the edge. By the 1990s, most members of the Chicago Police Department refused even to enter some of the projects. Called to investigate a robbery or rape, policemen were being killed by snipers waiting in ambush.
But, in the end, the positive actions of the Guard didn’t matter. When the bureaucrats started to receive the inevitable complaints from the Anti-Defamation League, the fact that the church was virulently anti-Semitic had eventually caused the Guard to lose their government contracts to police the projects. As news of the contracts seeped out, public outcry picked up, and the governmental decision makers who had quietly awarded the contracts realized immediately that the Guard had outlived their usefulness. True—they could be a powerful force for good in the community, but it was also true that they preached a doctrine of empowerment that was only partly focused on self-reliance. Critics alleged it was focused in equal measure on advocating revenge and retribution for perceived racial wrongs, and that ended up scaring a lot of nervous white folks in Winnetka.
While acknowledging that the Guard had, at times, been over-zealous, supporters countered that if the Guard had sometimes played a little fast and loose with civil rights, they had also restored law and order in what was essentially a war zone. More than that, the Guard’s advocates argued, the Guard was responsible for rehabilitating dangerous felons into productive members of society and providing the oft-cited inner city “youth” with positive role models of industry and discipline. Well, so —the Anti-Defamation League argued—did the Nazi brown shirts. Creating an alternate power structure in a democracy—state sponsored vigilantism—was always a dicey proposition. Creating one that might be preaching hate and supporting racial cleansing was particularly problematic.
What they really feared creating, Harrison thought, was what the pro-western or moderate governments in the Middle East were experiencing today. The Saudis had used the radical Wahhabi groups as a means to control a restless, disenfranchised segment of the population—believing that by doing so, they could bring them into the society, make them productive. The planners had been confident that these men would see for themselves the benefits of an open and free society.
But somehow it had gone badly wrong, and what any observer of the news would deduce, Harrison thought, was that the Middle Eastern oligarchies had begun to realize that they did not control the movement, the movement now controlled them. They had taken the most economically and socially disadvantaged—and therefore the most psychologically vulnerable—and turned them over to leaders who demanded total, unquestioning loyalty. The loyalty of this private army was to the group and their leaders, not to the state or the democracy.
It was axiomatic, Harrison thought, that any revolutionary group would end up taken over by their most radical members. And make no mistake, he thought, African Americans agitating for civil rights had been revolutionaries. Eventually, advocates of moderation were swept aside in virtually every revolutionary movement in world history—the French and Russian revolutions, communists in China, Korea, Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Islamofascists in Iran—all had started as moderate movements seeking reform—sometimes from within the existing governments. However, inexorably, incrementally, the bourgeois leaders were replaced and the group’s goals and objectives became increasingly more radical over time. In virtually every instance, the “founders” found themselves brushed away, pushed aside to make room for men with more far-reaching and game-changing agendas.
Harrison considered himself a history buff, and he knew from the survey courses he’d taken, that historians considered the American Revolution as one of the singular exceptions to the rule. Their argument was that it served as a model of (relatively) bloodless regime change—at least the victors did not turn on the population for ritualized ‘cleansing’, as had taken place in other countries. That the revolution did not precipitate class warfare —perhaps with the sole exception of the Whiskey Rebellion— was largely the result of the American colonists’ perception that the “class” that was persecuting them was an ocean away. After all, large landowners in Virginia were just as inconvenienced by the stamp tax as yeomen in Boston. Class distinctions in America were not institutionalized the way they were in Russia, China, or India.
One distinction America did observe, however, was that of color—specifically any color not white—and that had always been, Harrison thought, the fault-line of the American democracy. People were fond of saying that the Founding Fathers, who in the Constitution guaranteed equal protection for all men under the law—counted some of those men as only three-fifths of a person. But that promoted a profound misunderstanding of the three-fifths provision, Harrison thought. Counting the slaves never conferred any rights on those fractionated people, nor was it ever intended to do so. In any organization run by majority rule, numbers count. Counting the slaves —by any metric—served as a mechanism engineered by southern slaveholders to secure the equal dominion (and voting power) in the new nation of the darkly populated south with the more whitely populated north.
Of course, as Harrison’s sister was fond of reminding him, women—slave or free— were simply not counted at all. So, in a very real sense, the other fault line of the American Experiment was gender. Abigail Adams had urged the irascible John to “remember the ladies”— but probably like so many admonitions of wives to husbands—this had fallen on deaf ears. Historians liked to make note of the comment—not to applaud it, as they did an abolitionist minister castigating Jefferson about the evils of slavery—but to show what a ‘character’ Abigail Adams had been. Apparently, even great men like Adams had been forced to contend with a nagging wife.
The Founding Fathers were rightly faulted for not considering more closely the morality of keeping millions of the new republic’s black citizens in bondage, and yet seldom had these same moralists stopped to consider that the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of those esteemed and learned men had virtually no rights at all.
But, Harrison reflected, history had shown that perceptions could change. “Red” Indians, who
had been scorned in the days of Jackson (when their armies of warriors could still decimate white colonies), were sentimentally eulogized—even revered—by the time of Roosevelt and the new century. The explanation was simple: they had ceased to pose a threat. A hundred and ten years after Culloden, Queen Victoria decorated her castle in wall-to-wall plaid (plaids, whose appearance on a Highlander would have meant death seventy years before). Eighty years after the Civil War, even the antebellum South was rehabilitated with popular fiction and movies devoted to the graceful beauty of a system many had reviled as putrid and decaying decades before. Why, Harrison reflected, do people memorialize, even idealize, what they’ve worked so hard to destroy?
Harrison wasn’t really worried that the Guard was fomenting revolution. He thought fears of the Guard as anti-Semitic ‘Black radicals’ probably missed the point. His concerns about the Guard had more to do with the way they currently operated than any incendiary statements they’d made in the past. Because, despite their idealistic start, by the 1990s the Guard of Jehovah had morphed into a good deal more than volunteers policing the mean streets, or the Ministry’s personal security detail.
They had become an autonomous paramilitary security service—a virtual army—frequently hired by high profile African American entertainers, lawyers, and underworld kingpins. They were everywhere, in major cities across the United States: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Dayton, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and D.C. And they were packing. The U.S. Department of Defense had estimated in a memo to the Chicago Police Department that the Guard of Jehovah had 20,000 ‘uniformed’ troops, all carrying state of the art weapons.
Fair enough, Harrison reflected. Righteousness would only get the Guard so far when well-financed drug runners had arsenals more sophisticated than most countries. But the Guard not only acted outside the law, there were allegations that they acted as if they were above the law, as well. Most people in the projects considered the prepositions irrelevant. To them, the Guard simply was the law.
His cell rang. It was Fisher.
“Sir, Mrs. Jones wasn’t at her apartment when we arrived to pick her up today.” Harrison was instantly alert.
“No?” Harrison struggled for calm.
“No, sir, and nobody’s seen her since last night, either. She didn’t have any family, sir. Nobody to see to her—and she was pretty frail.”
“Did you check inside?” Harrison asked.
“Yes, sir. Manager gave us the key. No sign of disturbance. Everything neat and tidy,” Fisher replied.
“You’ve checked with the neighbors? Has anybody spoken with her?”
“Yes, sir,” Fisher replied. “Nobody has seen or spoken to her her since yesterday.”
“Anybody hear anything? See anything?” Harrison was grasping at straws.
“No, sir. As I said, we’ve checked with neighbors on the whole floor, and we’ve started canvassing the other apartments in the complex. If anybody saw anything, so far, at least, they’re not telling us. But…”
“Yes…?” Harrison prompted.
“All the neighbors did agree on one thing, sir,” Fisher paused.
“Yeah?” Harrison prompted. “What?”
“They’re sure she didn’t leave on her own.”
Harrison considered. “How can they be so sure?” he asked.
“She left her cat.”
Chapter Twelve
January 2008
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
HE’D DECIDED TO ATTEND THE PARTY AFTER ALL, mostly just to be polite. The primary consideration had been that he was sleeping with the hostess—although, when he thought about it, he wasn’t always sure why. Athena Dendridge worked hard at being perfect. First, of course, and perhaps most noticeably—she was one of the skinniest women in Washington. Her tiny little surgically sculpted nose was, in its way, perfect as a nose, and her voluptuous, bee-stung lips were perfectly crafted lips. With her immaculate makeup, and carefully sculpteted coiffure, she looked like an alien construct of the perfect human.
Not as obvious were the obsessive-compulsive issues that had her constantly adjusting everything in her environment. She operated in a state of constant restlessness—always waiting for the next thing, the next person. Generous, but so needy, being around her for any length of time was exhausting. Her divorce from a high-priced lobbyist would have left her comfortable—her inheritance from a Greek shipping magnate whose exact relationship to her remained unclear—made her rich.
Athena had enough money to do whatever she wanted, and Athena loved to throw parties: mixing the intertwining Washington networks like a cocktail. A few well-known journalists would be invited for color, a few politicians for gravitas, but the majority would be the real power brokers of D.C.—the members of its exclusive clubs who ran all the lobbying, law firms and think tanks.
Oh, well, he thought to himself, he didn’t have to stay long. More to the point, Athena would have good food. But as he moved through Athena’s large living room, he was genuinely pleased to see an old friend across the room. She was speaking to a group he knew. He watched her animated face as she delivered the punch line to the story she was telling. As the group started to break up, he tapped her gently on the shoulder and assumed his most beatific smile.
“Max!” she was delighted to see him and happily pecked him on both checks. “I’ve missed you. How are you?”
He’d long since decided that if he weren’t such a prick he’d be in love with her; maybe he was a little in love with her anyway.
“Better now that I’ve seen you, exquisite creature,” he said smoothly.
“Tell the truth, you vile flatterer.” She looked at him skeptically, her head tilted to one side, pretending to flutter her eyelashes at him.
Lacey Houghton had beautiful eyes.
“Careful, we’ll make your husband jealous,” he replied.
She laughed out loud. “Impossible.”
She took his arm and led him to an open space near the bar. “It is good to see you.”
“Everything going well? Kids, dog, suburban living?”
“Sure,” she replied carefully.
“Where the hell did you move to, anyway?”
She looked at him with an air that told him she was resigned to letting him play this out.
“Rockville, was it?” he continued.
“Yes, dear,” she said, still laughing at him. He missed having her in the city. They used to live in the same part of Kalorama and bump into each other with some frequency.
“And, you?” she said, her eyes full of mischief.
“I still get around,” he replied with a smirk.
“Ah,” she said, with a significant look at their hostess. “So I hear.”
He looked at her quickly from the corner of his eye. “You don’t approve?” He was surprised to find he was waiting for her answer.
“What is there to disapprove of? You’re both consenting, unattached adults.” Lacey, paused reflectively: “Actually, I like her enormously. She’s very…” She groped for the word momentarily… unusual for Lacey.
“Kind,” he supplied.
“Yes,” she smiled, surprised but pleased.
Max emptied his glass, and signaled to the waiter for a refill.
He leaned over without looking at her. “You always like the kind people.”
Lacey laughed, delighted: “And dogs. I do. It’s a weakness. What can I tell you?” she smiled.
He looked at her closely. “I hear you’ve become a political animal.”
Lacey smiled. “Hardly. But Claire McCracken will make a great president.”
He shook his head. “I don’t like her.”
“Maybe you just don’t like brilliant women,” Lacey teased.
“I like you,” he replied.
Lacey considered his answer. “True; but I’m cute….and I don’t make as much money as you do.” She paused, “Anyway, that kind of thinking is wrongheaded. It’s not im
portant that you like the president. It’s not as if you’re all going on a family vacation together.”
Max pretended to be affronted. “I’d go if she asked. And for the record—I’d still like you, even if you made as much money as me, Lacey.”
Lacey shook her head, laughing. “Not if I got to order you around.”
“I dunno,” Max regarded her appraisingly. “Try it. I think I might like it.” He smirked, she rolled her eyes.
The waiter handed him a new glass from a silver tray. He raised his glass to him by way of saying thanks. He took a sip of his bourbon.
“Anyway, he’s an asshole.”
Lacey was momentarily confused. “Who?” she asked.
Max sipped his drink. “Okono,” he replied.
Lacey was surprised. “Really?”
“Yup. Cold. Full of himself. Lazy as shit—just shows up for the press conferences. Ever heard him speak on the House floor?” Max questioned.
Lacey considered for a moment. “No.”
“Me, neither.” Max shook his head. “I’m thinking that if this guy were such a natural orator we might have noticed.”
“Okay,” Lacey replied, her curiosity piqued. “The guy’s never done anything of merit and from what you’re telling me, he’s not exactly knocking himself out to change the planet now…” Max nodded. Lacey continued, “So, why is everybody in the party salivating over him?”
Max rolled his eyes as if she were being intentionally obtuse. “Jesus, Lacey, the guy’s black.”
Lacey was nonplussed. “Yeah, I noticed.”
Max continued as if he were explaining something very basic. “And he’s handsome and he went to Harvard.”
“So?” Lacey replied, unimpressed, “I could think of twenty African Americans that are great looking and went to top schools who have done more than Okono.”
Max laughed, a gleam in his eye. “Yeah? Well, tell them to call me. We need them to run for office.”