by Robert White
I snapped to and heard Booth, dapper as ever, cut his eyes slightly to Chief Millimaki and dismiss him. Millimaki took the hint, not gracefully, and shifting his signature cigar around in his mouth with a wet, plopping noise, took leave of us in his own office.
“Well, Thomas,” said Booth, “we seem to be star-crossed lovers, you and I.”
“So it would seem,” I said.
“I’m glad to see you’re recovered. I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this, but I wasn’t altogether sure you were going to pull through your ordeal when I saw you last.”
“I don’t think much about those days,” I said.
“I understand,” he replied.
“Are you here to discuss the great themes of life and art or do you have something else in mind, Special Agent Booth?”
Then, as if noticing for the first time, he said, “Aren’t you about twenty pounds lighter than you used to be? I remember seeing you run. Half-moons of sweat under your arms, your belly hanging over your belt—”
“I’ve cut back on the Scotch and bourbon a little. You know, I believe I’ll take a jog around the park right now.”
“Knock it off,” This said with a bit more snarl than he meant.
“OK,” I said, “what gives?”
“Ever heard of the Phineas Priesthood?”
Priests. Oh shit. Boston. Here we go again.
And so he told me. Not all of it right there. Booth was no fool, and he didn’t trust Millimaki as far as he could throw him. Out of his presence, he used to call him “the fat one,” if memory served, but FBI agents are taught to work closely with local law enforcement. Never alienate street cops because you never know when you might want to use them again. The operant word being use.
It was about racism. Organized murder, to be precise—a movement to create chaos and civil disorder on the scale of nothing ever seen in the country before. Not like the civil rights nor Vietnam protests, those organic movements of the people, but a combination of alliances of top and bottom of society, although the bottom would never know it. Through the well-greased system of legal corruption in which politicians are willingly bought or rented with lobbyists’ cash doled out by the richest and most powerful, the impossible becomes possible. When the dust settles and the people demand order, they’ll get it all right—but it will resemble the Ordnüng of Nazi Germany more than anything.
I looked at Booth as if I were hearing one of those conspiracy theories from one of our local juiceheads at the bar.
“You’re crazy,” I said. “Doesn’t the FBI have anything better to do now that bin Laden’s sleeping with the fishes?”
“Our purview is domestic by law, Haftmann. That’s the CIA’s job, not ours,” Booth replied primly.
“OK,” I said, “I’ll play along. Tell me how this organized chaos begins.”
He did at length and through three sloe gin fizzes to my sparkling sodas and a St. Pauly Girl.
He said it will start with secret funding of racist groups and hundreds of acts of violence all over the United States.
I interjected: “We still vote in this country, right?”
“Of course,” Booth admitted, “but what’s the significance of that when the entire propaganda machine of the media is overwhelmed by money to influence the direction people will vote.”
“We’re not sheep. People still think now and then,” I said. “Reporters dig up stories. You can’t buy everyone in the country, for God’s sake.”
“Don’t be naïve, Thomas. You just need fifty-one percent.”
According to Booth, one group in particular had surfaced in recent FBI reports that had for years been documenting and tracking white supremacist groups ever since the assassination of Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963. This was a secret society that called itself the Phineas Priesthood.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ve got a black President of the United States. Nobody pays any attention to those Neanderthals nowadays.”
“You’re wrong. Haven’t you been listening? Where were you when a few Wall Street degenerate gamblers nearly took the economy of the United States over the ledge in oh-eight? This isn’t a dying twitch of Southern racism from the civil rights days. This is a new federation working behind the scenes while the entire country is obsessed with Muslims next door.”
“That’s why the whole country is fed up with you federal police,” I said. “Paranoia, Booth. Didn’t you people learn anything from Waco or Ruby Ridge?”
“It’s because of Ruby Ridge and Waco we’re so hamstrung now,” Booth said. He sipped his drink and made a face. Tico’s wasn’t known for serving bonded Scotch.
“It was a dying movement, but these are the very conditions that make for non-violent coups d’ état.”
“I’ll concede this much: the Midwest is like Appalachia now. We’re a dying breed and none of you in Washington give a shit.”
Booth grinned.
“What’s so fucking funny?”
“You just proved my point,” he said.
“Look,” I said, “it’s too much. Congressional hearings on Muslims in America as a smokescreen for big business or whatever it is just so a few rich people can grab what’s left? A few rednecks joining the Tea Party or falling for that Birther nonsense—come on, that dog doesn’t hunt.”
“Greed,” Booth said smugly, “has no bottom.”
“You’re Thomas Aquinas now,” I mocked.
“You should read City of God,” he replied.
“I don’t need to,” I said, “I’ve read Dante.” Actually, I skipped Paradiso and Purgatorio. Everything I needed to know about human beings is in the Inferno.
“Then I shouldn’t have to convince you that rain is wet. Read history. Hitler didn’t get to power because he wasn’t helped every step of the way. Bankers and politicians did more to assist the rise of National Socialism than the commies.”
“I still say, so what? Just because Donald Trump goes on television and demands the President show his birth certificate,” I said, “doesn’t mean he’s an unwitting tool of a conspiracy of braindead racist thugs and the conservative establishment.”
Booth stared into his drink, pushed it aside, and then ordered another sloe gin fizz. I remembered that drink from high school; it was a girl’s drink then.
“I just don’t believe that’s possible,” I said. I barked a laugh: ludicrous.
“When you put powerful people, money, and a common cause together, things can happen.”
“Oh really? I suppose you have evidence of this?”
“We do and we didn’t need warrantless wiretaps to get it. Look at this.”
Booth handed me the case file and told me to read it all and not ask any questions until I was done. By then it was midafternoon and we were still sitting in Tico’s Place. In the few short weeks I had been back from Boston, a cold spring had flip-flopped into a hot and muggy early summer.
I was tempted to ask Booth if he appreciated the irony; we had nearly come to a fistfight in the station house once when I learned that he had finally wearied of my demands for information, files, and updates and had told everyone to freeze me out of the investigation.
While I perused, Booth gazed out the window over a periwinkle blue lake, watching the gulls wheel and dive among white caps at schools of early shad. By late August, they’d swim to shore to in their annual massive die-off, millions of them. The odor of rot would be everywhere.
And so I read names, dates, and facts that went back thirty years. Much of it was familiar to me from newspapers and having lived through those times. Some of the names rang bells like Byron De La Beckwith, for example. The killer of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. There was a faded newspaper clipping from the Knoxville News Sentinel, dated September 17, 1973, in which Beckwith was arrested for carrying an armed bomb into New Orleans. He did three years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Pen in Angola. I scanned one of Beckwith’s letters in 1986 to The News-Free Press in Chattanooga on sod
ium fluoride in the public water system: ‘So also does constant dosage work on the human mind to stifle normal resistance, to say, tyranny, and also, of course, to greatly diminish wholesome resourcefulness.’
I found an envelope with a return address in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, to the local water board. Inside was a letter from Beckwith making the same complaint, and noting that “queers/perverts, and even a few innocents with AIDS, die much faster drinking fluoridated water.” He had added: “So, there is a great scrambling/shifting of population to non-fluoridated water. Well, if fluoride kills AIDS-infected perverts, en masse, then that to me is great—God orders the same (using stones)—or have you read your Bible lately?”
Other clippings detailed his shadowy life and affiliations with hate groups beyond his obsession with fluoride and AIDS. Twenty-five years after killing Evers, the Jackson Daily News quoted a Mississippi attorney who demanded Beckwith be tried again for a murder he publicly bragged about.
I looked up to see Booth calmly sipping his drink and gazing out over the water.
“What’s this?” I asked.
I showed him membership information on the American Pistol and Rifle Association. Booth barely glanced at it. “That’s a military survivalist outfit near Benton, Tennessee. Remember an extremist group called The Order, early 1980’s?” He rattled off names: Ardie McBrearty, Randall Rader, Richard Scutari, Andrew Barnhill. Netted four million from armed robbery and counterfeiting. Murder, bombings. They first met at Benton during a three-day survival hike.
I riffled brochures with titles like Jews Are of Their Father, the Devil, advertisements for various Christian-survivalist groups where one might learn the “truth about Martin Lucifer Coon,” the black race, the real goals of international Jewry and “Jewsmedia”—and enjoy a little firearms practice on the side. Beckwith himself operated one for a time called the Rod of Iron Christian Mission. Pamphlets from paramilitary and revolutionary organizations of all kinds like the Southern National Party claiming the South never surrendered at Appomattox (“This is a popular misconception encouraged by liberal academics and the left-wing media, but it is completely false”) and Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance. I had seen Metzger on a talk show once. He referred to blacks as a “mud race.”
I had to stop when the shooting pains behind my eyeball became too bad. “So what else is new, Booth? Most of this stuff is old garbage. Except for the cross-burning and baseball-bat wielding, there’s nothing here that isn’t covered by free speech. Just your garden-variety Klansmen and Neo-Nazis—or am I missing something?”
“You are, as a matter of fact. But so haven’t a lot of people for a long time.”
I didn’t know whether I should pity him or laugh at him. Looking for a comeback on the strength of the rise of neo-Nazis in America. I had once admired him though we didn’t get along.
“I’m having tissue samples from O’Reilly sent to Basic Sciences. We’ve already done this for the daughter. It’s a big case, and getting bigger all the time.”
I reached for something to say. “So old Doc Harris fumbled another one?”
I myself had a long working relationship with the conservative and pugnacious Jefferson County pathologist. Harris wouldn’t sign off on a corpse with a knife sticking in its back and call it homicide unless the killer’s hand was attached. I had made the turkey wattles under his neck vibrate with indignation more than once when I chivvied him about some point of forensics. He was arrogant right up to his polka-dotted tie and down to his Oxford wingtips. He’d no sooner clap eyes on me than he would leave the office and order an assistant to walk me off the premises. During one especially acrimonious exchange, I told him he could fuck up a baked potato, and I saw the tips of his handlebar mustache quiver with rage.
“What did he miss?”
“We won’t know for sure until the results come back. Maybe something from toxicology that Harris’s rinkydink lab couldn’t find.”
Booth being coy. “C’mon, Booth. You know Harris would send anything he couldn’t handle to Cuyahoga County especially with you leaning on him.”
Booth sniffed and smoothed his silver pompadour with one hand. “Let’s just leave it at asphyxiation for now. That’s what the death certificate says.”
“So why Annaliese too? What are you guys looking for?”
“You were in Boston. What did you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said and winced at the ugly memory. “She bled from every orifice.”
“We found out one thing,” he said. “She was clubbed too.”
“Clubbed?”
“Her brain almost fell out of her head when they lifted her onto the gurney.”
“All right, Booth. Stop simpering and tell me what you came here to tell me.”
That’s when he got to the part about the Phineas Priesthood. Before Beckwith died, he was a kind of ambassador-at-large among hate groups. He knew them all and despite his public buffoonery, such as walking into a courtroom with his Celtic cross dangling from his withered neck and shading his eyes to scan the jurors for blacks, issued moronic statements on race, the water, and AIDS. But he held some troubling influence nonetheless.
One of the FBI documents was a prison guard’s testimony about the people who came to see Beckwith in prison; someone had apparently angered the old man because he described the change in Beckwith’s demeanor as staggering: a great snaky vein popped out on his forehead and he raged at this man, some underling or messenger: “Be very careful because I have more power in jail than you have out there.”
Some interesting people kept the former candy salesman on their personal Christmas card lists dated back to the early 1960’s when, according to Booth, the FBI had already documented over 300 separate acts of violence from the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. Only one of which happened to be the assassination of Medgar Evers, shot in the back by a sniper using a 6x scope, as he stepped away from his car coming home from a rally at the New Jerusalem Baptist Church in Jackson.
I flashed back to the cover photo from Life and segued to the infamous triple murder of three civil rights workers. I was sailing on the ore boats at the time, aboard the J. Burton Ayers, my first steamship as an ordinary seaman on the Great Lakes, and I remembered Max, the watchman I had killed in that alley in Lackawanna, New York, mentioning to me that a nigger, a nigger-lover, and a Jewboy had been dug up near a levee somewhere in the deep South. “You look like a niggerlover to me, boy,” he said. We were headed into Duluth Harbor with a load of taconite. “That right, Haftmann?” When I turned from coiling one of the ropes on deck, I saw him grimacing at me in that open-mouthed smile of his, all rotten teeth and rank breath. You a Jew-lover too, Haftmann? Faggot cocksucking college boy nigger lover . . .
Booth recited some names and organizations from the Beckwith file—a Who’s Who from that darkened corner of our history that finally numbed us to public murder. I was one of millions born into the promise of the world after the Second World War and one of those who watched it turn to shit. My pathetic little wheel of destiny was also turning in those days before all promises withered including my job, my marriage, and hardest of all, the children I’ll never father.
Micah, always Micah that ripped inside me with her claws.
I snapped to and heard Booth reciting names, some of them from yellowed newspaper clippings like Sam Bowers, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan; Pastor Richard G. Butler, founder of Aryan Nations. I read his fan letter to Beckwith in prison and of course he signed it with an “88,” meaning Heil Hitler; Pastor Dan Gayman of Christian Identity (Beckwith, ordained a minister in 1977, wrote a prison letter thanking the pastor for his inspirational tapes); J.B. Stoner, founder of the National States Rights party; Metzger from California and David Dukes from Louisiana hailing him a hero and “selfless patriot” . . .
“Haftmann, are you following me?”
“Yes, continue, Professor.”
That drew a scowl and a swipe at the silver ha
ir. “OK, I’m boring you with ancient history. Let me cut to the present. Beckwith’s a liquid, but let me throw one more name at you, another close friend and supporter. His name is Richard Kelly Hoskins of Lynchburg, Virginia.”
I said, “Means nothing to me.”
Booth, ever the lecturer, said, “Hoskins isn’t one of your wiggedout types, spewing racist filth in all directions. He stays out of the limelight mostly. But he did one thing of interest. He appointed himself historian of a secret society—”
“Your Phineas Priesthood,” I finished.
“Exactly. Read this.” He handed me another sheaf of papers.
“Jesus, I feel like I’m cramming for a high school test.”
“Just skim it then,” he said and muttered something about me being a “one-eyed Cyclops.”
I sighed and signaled the bartender over. Tico’s son Cesar used to be a hot prospect of a welterweight who trained with Kelly “The Ghost” Pavlik in Jack Loew’s Southside gym in Youngstown before he busted his hand up. I ordered a shot of Jack and a beer chaser.
Booth looked at me.
“I earned this one,” I said, “listening all afternoon to your conspiracy theory.”
I read on.
Hoskins was a follower of the Christian Identity movement before he got the writing bug and began recording the history of the Phineas Priesthood. “Here, read this first.” He handed me a Bible, and I looked up to see Tico giving me a big grin with his gold tooth. He made a thumb’s-up sign to me. Tico was as devout a Catholic as I was an atheist.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “When Tico shows that gold incisor, it means something. I’ll be hearing about the day I got religion in Tico’s Place for the next ten years. Next time, use the xerox machine.” To Tico, I said, “Wipe that shit-eating grin off your face, you wet-backed spawn of Satan and bring this man another drink while I peruse the Holy Word.”