A door had painted upon it AMERICA WILL BREAK and the organization’s three-pronged insignia. Lee stepped over two bodies in gray and one in green, walked inside. The fellow whose head and torso he had seen from the street had fought from a window here. Bullets had chewed up the wall opposite that window; the picture that hung there was no longer recognizable.
One of the bandsmen who guarded Lee looked around and said, “Take away the dead men and it ain’t so very peculiar, is it?”
He was right; shorn of carnage, the offices of America Will Break might have housed any fair-sized business or trading establishment. Lee did not know quite what he’d expected. Perhaps, knowing what he knew about the Rivington men, he’d looked for the future to have impinged more visibly on their operation. But the desks, the chairs, the cabinets full of papers here seemed at first glance no different from those in the War Department across the street. Those papers would have to be examined, of course, but their home appeared utterly ordinary.
“You’d reckon anybody nasty enough to do what these bastards done ought to have a place that looks worse’n this,” the guard went on.
“That’s so,” Lee said thoughtfully. The bandsman, whose every word declared his lack of education, had nonetheless touched an important truth. Evil, to Lee’s way of looking at things, ought to declare itself openly, to appear as foul as it was in fact. But the headquarters of America Will Break, a group that stopped at nothing, not even indiscriminate murder, to achieve its ends, had for the eye, at least, no taint. Somehow the semblance of normality made even worse the evil it contained.
Lee strode from room to room within the suite. All the furnishings were like those of the chamber through which he’d entered, which is to say, unmemorable. But unmemorable men could not have plotted such hideously memorable deeds.
At last Lee came to a door before which several soldiers stood. “It’s locked, sir,” one said. “We put a shoulder to it, but it don’t want to move.”
Excitement flowered within Lee—was this the Rivington men’s sanctum sanctorum? “Send for a locksmith, then, if you have not already done so,” he said. The soldier hurried away. Lee examined the doorknob. Here at last was something unfamiliar: its shape was like none he had ever seen. He wondered what luck the locksmith would have with it. The door was painted with a smooth coat of gray enamel. He rapped it. It was metallically cold, metallically hard, and gave not at all.
Jingling with tools, the locksmith arrived around half past six, and set to work at once. Five days later, despite his efforts, those of the best burglar in Richmond (released from jail to test his expertise), and a team of men armed with a stout ram, the door remained closed.
Once more, Lee found himself awash in telegrams. He would willingly have forgone the flood of sympathy, and indeed, were it possible, would have’ forgone the telegrams that had announced his election and set in train that bloody March 4.
From the flood, though, came a few messages he cherished. One, from Springfield, Illinois, in the U.S.A., said simply,
MAY GOD BE WITH YOU AND YOUR COUNTRY IN YOUR HOUR OF SORROW. YOU ARE IN MY PRAYERS. The printed signature read, A. LINCOLN.
Another came from Clarksdale, Mississippi:
REQUEST YOUR KIND PERMISSION TO RESCIND MY RESIGNATION FROM CONFEDERATE STATES CAVALRY SO I CAN LEAD AGAINST THE MURDERERS WHO WOULD SET AT NAUGHT OUR REPUBLIC AND ITS INSTITUTIONS—N. B. FORREST.
“How shall I respond to this one from Forrest, sir?” asked Charles Marshall, who had resumed his wartime post as Lee’s aide. By his tone, he wanted nothing to do with the Patriot leader.
But Lee said, “Answer, ‘Your country is ever grateful for your service, Lieutenant General Forrest.’ He and I may fail to see eye-to-eye on a great many issues, but hypocrisy has never been numbered among his vices. And against the men of America Will Break, I fear we may need the most able military talent available to us. Do you deny Forrest’s native gifts along those lines?” Marshall shook his head, but his mouth was set in a narrow line of disapproval as he wrote down Lee’s reply and took it to the telegraph office.
That afternoon, Lee endured his wife’s funeral service. Bishop Johns, one arm in a sling from the wound he himself had taken up on the platform, spoke of how all-wise Providence had Summoned Mary from the world of men, of how her spirit yet lived and would continue to inspire everyone who had known her thanks to the courage with which she had faced adversity, of her unshaken confidence in God as her hope and strength, which all would do well to emulate.
Lee believed with his whole being every word the Right Reverend Johns spoke, yet the oration brought less comfort than it should have, serving instead to tear off the scab which had begun to grow over his grief. He wept, unashamed, as a hearse drawn by six black horses took his wife’s coffin to the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad depot to start its final journey to Arlington. He knew she would never have forgiven him for interring her anywhere else.
A lieutenant came up to him as he was leaving St. Paul’s, Church. “I beg your pardon, sir, for disturbing you at such a time, but your orders were to be informed the moment we succeeded in entering that sealed chamber. We have just done so.”
“Thank you, young man. Yes, I shall go there at once. Have you a carriage?”
“Yes, sir. If you will follow me—” The lieutenant drove Lee east on Broad to Ninth, and then down the western side of Capitol Square to the building that had sheltered America Will Break. When he swung right onto Franklin, Lee pointed and exclaimed. The lieutenant chuckled. “We took a leaf from your book, sir. Since that damned door—I beg your pardon again—defeated our every frontal assault, we decided to outflank it.”
A ladder leaned against the side of the building. Several masons in grimy overalls stood at the base of the wall. One still held a mallet and chisel. Crowbars and pry bars, along with chunks of stone and broken brick, lay on the sidewalk. They’d broken a hole in the wall big enough for a man to crawl though.
“Has anyone gone in yet?” Lee asked. When the lieutenant shook his head, Lee descended from the carriage and hurried toward the ladder.
The lieutenant sprang down, too, and got in front of him. With the self-conscious voice junior officers use when dressing down their superiors, he said, “With your permission, sir, I shall precede you, in case the Rivington men”—men was not the word he used—”have placed a torpedo or some other infernal device in there.”
Lee considered that, reluctantly nodded. His courage was not at issue here, and his duty to his country was. “Very well, Lieutenant; carry on.”
The young soldier swarmed up the ladder, disappeared into the inky hole. Lee waited with barely contained worry and impatience until he stuck his head out again. “Seems safe enough, sir, though I tripped over a chair and damn near broke my fool neck. Can you bring a lantern up with you? It’s still almighty dark inside.”
A soldier darted into the War Department across the street, came out with a lantern which he handed to Lee. He and a couple of the masons steadied the ladder while Lee ascended. Lee was simultaneously grateful and offended: they hadn’t offered the spry young lieutenant any such assistance. How decrepit did they think he was?
At the top of the climb, the lieutenant took the lantern from him, then helped him through the hole. He held the flickering light on high while Lee got to his feet. Its faint yellow beams and the gray light that came through the hole in the outer wall told Lee at once that America Will Break truly did not belong to 1868, or any year close to it.
“Metal,” he muttered. “Everything metal.” The desks, the cabinets, the bookcases against the walls, the swivel chairs, all were painted metal, like the impenetrable door that had so long defeated everything the Confederacy threw at it. On this side, he noticed, that door was set well into the wall. Its inner surface was not painted at all, only polished, and cast back at Lee the light the lantern shed upon it.
Above one of the cabinets, a low one, hung a poster blazoned with the emb
lem of America Will Break. Above the insignia stood the AWE initials Lee had first seen on Andries Rhoodie’s coffee mug in camp above Orange Court House. He wondered where Rhoodie was. The big man had not died on March 4, nor had he been at his house when soldiers came that evening, armed with a warrant and with AK-47s set on full automatic. That worried Lee—this side of Bedford Forrest, Rhoodie was as dangerous a man as he could think of.
Below the three bent spikes in their circle stood a pair of unfamiliar words: AFRIKANER WEERSTANDSBEWEGING, and below them, in smaller letters, AFRIKANER RESISTANCE MOVEMENT. Lee cocked his head. He wondered what an Afrikaner was—not an African, certainly, not by the way the Rivington men treated Negroes—and whether the name betokened resistance against Afrikaners, whatever they were, or by them.
He deliberately turned away from the poster, refusing to let inessentials sidetrack him” He walked over to the polished metal door, set his hand on the knob. The lieutenant dashed up and tried to turn it for him. This time, he refused to yield his place. The men on the other side of that door had done everything but fire a Napoleon at it—and they’d contemplated that, desisting only for fear of damaging the room the door guarded. Were it hooked to a torpedo, they surely would have set off the explosive charge.
He worked the knob. It did not turn smoothly—the Confederates had managed that much, at any rate, in their efforts to force it—but it turned. The door was heavy. Lee had to exert his full strength to pull it back, and the massive hinges squealed in protest as he did so, but it opened. A couple of officers standing on the other side stared at him, then grinned and began to clap.
Their applause was joined by another noise, a low, throaty rumble, that began as soon as the door swung wide. They stopped clapping. The rumble went on. Looking about for its source, Lee decided after a few seconds that it was somehow coming from within the thickened wall. It sounded mechanical, though not really like a steam engine. He wondered why anyone would want to conceal something mechanical inside a wall.
Behind him, in the hidden chamber, the lieutenant cried out. He whirled, wondering what trap the youngster had sprung. He saw no trap, only the lieutenant’s startled face. He saw that very clearly, for several long, thin tubes mounted on the ceiling—he’d not noticed them before; who notices ceilings?—had suddenly started shedding a fine, white light that illuminated the room as well as hazy sunshine might have. “What on earth—?” the lieutenant said. Lee did not know what on earth, either, though after a moment’s reflection he supposed he should not have been surprised the Rivington men enjoyed better lamps even than gaslight. But understanding all their tricks was another inessential now. The shining tubes let him read the titles of the volumes that packed these secret bookshelves. As soon as he saw the Picture History of the Civil War was one of them, the shelves drew him like a lodestone.
He ran a finger lightly down the spine of the Picture History, as if to reassure himself it was real. Somehow, finding a second copy of it was far more than twice as strange as finding only one. One was an isolated curiosity, a liber ex machina. But where there were two, there had to be hundreds, thousands. All at once, the distant time from which the men of the AWB had come felt nearly close enough for him to touch.
And that Picture History proved to be but one of hundreds of books about the Second American Revolution, though they called it the Civil War, or the War Between the States, or occasionally the Great Rebellion. He found memoirs by Joe Johnston, by u. S. Grant, by Jefferson Davis—he shook his head when he saw Davis’s were called The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Nation—byJubal Early. He shook his head again; he’d gone to Early’s funeral yesterday and knew his former division commander had written no memoirs. Nor, for that matter, had Johnston or Grant or Davis.
He also found studies on the battle of the Wilderness; on Confederate railroads; on black-white relations, North and South, before, during, and after the Second American Revolution; and on Confederate Richmond—one, he saw with wry amusement, was called General Lee’s City. The amusement slipped when he pulled the book off the shelf and saw on its cover Richmond in flames. He opened the book, discovered it had been published—would be published? would have been published?—in 1987. He also noted that its author was one Richard M. Lee, and wondered if the man was a descendant. If he was, he had an impartiality Robert E. Lee approved of, for he also seemed to have written a book named Mr. Lincoln’s City.
Lee put the book back in its place. It stood near half a shelf of volumes that looked to be devoted exclusively to him. He left them alone. He already knew who he was. The Rivington men, for all their reference works, plainly did not.
Along with the books on the Confederacy, Lee found several shelves of volumes on South Africa—not a country, so far as he knew, that appeared on the globe in 1868. Some had their titles written in English, but more in the German-looking language that had also produced the phrase Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging.
It was not German. That had been Lee’s first guess, when papers written in it turned up in the files of the AWB outer offices. But a professor of German summoned from the Virginia Military Institute had taken one look and gone back to V MI with his tail between his legs. Lee did not let failure frustrate him—and where the professor gave up, a Richmond merchant, a Jew from Aachen, was able to make fair sense of the AWB’s private tongue.
Lee stuck his head out the door, asked the two soldiers in the adjoining room, “Is Mr. Goldfarb anywhere about?”
“Yes, sir, I saw him next door,” said one of them, a captain. He turned to his companion. “You want to go and fetch him in here, Fred?”
Fred, who was a lieutenant, went and fetched him. Avram Goldfarb was a medium-sized, heavyset man in his fifties, with curly gray hair and a curly gray beard long enough to obviate any need for a cravat. His nose was more distinctly Hebraic than that of Judah P. Benjamin, and his eyes…when Lee looked into those dark, deep-set eyes, he gained a more profound understanding of the Book of Jeremiah than he had enjoyed before. Avram Goldfarb had seen sorrow, for himself and for his folk.
He dipped his head to Lee. “You’ve found more papers in this verkakte tongue for me to read, sir?” At Lee’s nod, he rolled those sorrowful eyes. “I will do my best, even if it makes me crazy. This speech, it is not Deutsch—German, you would say—it is not Dutch, as I should know, since Aachen lies by the border and before ‘48 I did as much trade with Amsterdam as with Cologne…But enough. This speech, it is not quite anything. It is, you would say in English, a mishmash.”
Lee was not sure he would say that, but he got the idea. He stood aside to let Goldfarb into the secret chamber. The Jew blinked when he noticed the extraordinary ceiling lights, but Lee gave him no time to ponder them. He pulled out a book that had Akrikaner Weerstandsbeweging in its title, hoping it would tell him more about the AWB.
“The African Resistance Movement: What It Is, by Eugen Blankaatd,” Goldfarb read.
“’African’?” Lee pointed to the poster on the wall.
“Afrikaner, then,” Goldfarb said, shrugging, “whatever an Afrikaner may be.” He opened the book to the frontispiece, an arresting photograph of a stalwart young man, his right arm upraised, his left hand on a Bible, standing blindfolded in front of what looked like a firing squad armed with AK-47s. There were a few lines of text under the photograph. Goldfarb translated them: “If I advance, follow me. If I retreat, shoot me. If I die, avenge me. So help me God…”
It was not the oath of a group that did anything by halves. Lee let air hiss out through his nose; to his sorrow, he already knew that. Whatever Goldfarb thought of it, his face revealed nothing. He turned the page, then startled Lee by starting to laugh. He pointed to the copyright page. “The printer must have been drunk, sir, and the proofreader too, or someone would have noticed this says the book was made in 2004.” He laughed again, louder this time.
“Mr. Goldfarb,” Lee said seriously, “I suggest you never speak of this, ah, error to anyone save me. Please believe
me when I tell you I make this suggestion for your own safety.”
The Jew studied him, saw he meant what he said. Slowly, he nodded. “I will do as you say, sir. Now to the—is foreword an English word?”
“The preface, perhaps,” Lee said after a moment’s thought.
“The preface. Thank you. I begin: ‘More than half a Jahrhundert’—excuse me, a century—’ago, during the Second Worldwar—’” He said it like that, as if it were one word, so Lee needed a second to understand and another to start to imagine what it meant, but Goldfarb was already going on: “ ‘a great man, Koot Vorster, said, “Hitler’s My Struggle shows the way to greatness, the way to South Africa. Hitler gave the Germans a calling. He gave them a fanaticism which causes them to stand back for no one. We must follow this example because only by such fanaticism can the Afrikaner nation achieve its calling.” Goldfarb looked to Lee. “This, to me, is nonsense. Do you wish me to go on with it?”
Lee did not understand the historical references either, but he knew that was because the history in question had yet to happen. He also got a stronger feeling for the way the AWB thought: fanaticism, to his way of thinking, was no virtue, yet the Rivington men plainly considered it one. He said, “Please do continue, Mr. Goldfarb.”
“If you like.” Goldfarb cleared his throat and went on: “ ‘But no one—hmm—heeded Vorster.’ I am sorry, sir, but this is Dutch spelled as if the devil had written it, and I must sometimes guess what it means. ‘South Africa threw in with England, and Hitler and Germany were beaten—and so was South Africa. Now we whites are prisoners in our own country, ruined by stupid, evil laws that make all men alike, regardless of their color. Those who cursed our land with these laws call themselves liberal, but they lie. They call us outlaws. We take pride in the name, and call them fools. They have been seduced by outlanders and outlanders’ ways, and we will no more stand for it. White power shall yet rise again, and put the kaffir’—I do not know what a kaffir is, I am sorry—’back down into his proper place. The rest of the world be damned, say I. So say we all.’”
The Guns of the South Page 58