Street Legal

by William Deverell

  “I’ll bet in your heart you don’t believe that.”

  “Okay, you’re lousy. But I love you anyway.”

  He said it. He had to make a joke of it, but he said it. Carrie decided she wanted to make love to him tonight. Close the book, close the wounds.

  ***

  At the Tchobanian household, Chuck wasn’t about to make love to anyone. He was making up the fold-out sofa in the living room into a bed for himself. A brief conversation with Lisa had convinced him it wasn’t going to be so much fun being on opposite sides of the Squire case.

  8

  Herbert Orff’s hero was Adolf Hitler. Sometimes he felt he was Adolf Hitler. Every once in a while, he heard himself speaking with a screechy German accent, like in old newsreels he’d seen. But he heard other voices coming from him, too, when you got down to it, although he never could quite make them out. They came when he was daydreaming and he would sort of lose touch with himself, and he would come back to earth realizing he was supposed to be filling out an inspection report on a landfill site, and Mr. Blumberg would be climbing all over his big round behind if he didn’t finish it.

  Herbert Orff was Sewer Inspection Clerk II for the Waste Management Office in Scarborough, ten years of unswerving duty with local government. Two years ago he had make Clerk II from Clerk III, his one promotion. That he had not risen farther in the hierarchy of the Waste Management branch was, he felt, a result of conspiracies hatched by the chief supervisor, Mr. Blumberg, whose constant mean kidding gave him migraine headaches.

  Orff didn’t look like Adolf Hitler. Though he was short — only five feet, four inches tall — he was shaped like a top, like those twins he saw once in a cartoon show, Tweedledum or something, his chin extending in an unbroken arc almost to his chest. At twenty-eight he was already starting to go bald, and his remaining hair was cut short in patchy bristles.

  Mr. Blumberg kept referring to him as “you fat ugly flub,” and “you dumb foul ball.” Mr. Blumberg would say in front of the others in the office, “Herbert here can’t pick his nose without putting his finger in his eye.” “Nerd” was another word he often heard. Herbert the oversized nerd. Sometimes he even heard his disembodied voices calling him a nerd.

  But some day people were going to stop saying that to him: some day he was going to change the world.

  His own world changed last year. That’s when Orff received in the mail a sample copy of a magazine called The Simple Truth, published somewhere in Alberta, which contained an article about Jews. He learned something about what they are like, how they victimize people. He subscribed to The Simple Truth, and discovered a lot of amazing things: for instance, contrary to what the media would have you believe, only a few Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, all from cancer and old age.

  The Holocaust was just one of countless falsehoods propagated by owners of newspapers and TV networks, who were themselves Jews. That’s where the power in today’s society lay: in the media. Information was power; the masters of the media controlled information.

  The publisher and editor of The Simple Truth, one Dr. Austin Yorvil, had written a book called A Thousand Lies Exposed, and Orff sent away for it with a cheque and a letter saying how his eyes had been opened. Not one but fifty copies arrived, with an extremely friendly letter from Dr. Yorvil telling him he could keep half of what he sold the copies for. “We must spread the word!” his letter exclaimed.

  The book was thin at two hundred pages, but packed with fact, startling fact. How Stalin was actually a Jew. Why Jews go into law. How the media elite control you through the TV and the newspapers. The plot to fill Canada with non-Christian people of inferior blood. He read it over and over, relished it, felt stirrings, felt as if he’d been initiated into something big. But how to get the word out, how to sell these copies of A Thousand Lies Exposed?

  They were not something Orff would want to show around the office, or to have Mr. Blumberg find during one of his snooping expeditions under the fill-site requisitions in his bottom drawer. At the very thought of that, he developed one of his headaches, and with them came the voices.

  He took copies around to several bookstores, but quickly found they were controlled by the power elite, too, and a couple of the bookstore people were quite insulting. So after work on Monday, July 28, he set up a table at Queen and Parliament and began offering them directly to the public.

  “Read about the mind enslavers before it’s too late,” he called out to passersby in his most forceful voice.

  They ignored him. People don’t tune in unless they’re in front of a TV set, that’s what Dr. Yorvil wrote. They’re programmed every day by the TV. Much of it was subliminal, although Orff wasn’t sure what that meant. He used to watch a lot of television before he learned what they were doing to him.

  “Read how they use the state to censor truth and lawyers to twist it. Read the new evidence about races.”

  He heard a slurred voice, with what seemed like an Irish lilt. “I know all about races, b’y. They fix ’em.” At first Orff thought this was one of those strange voices that tended to come out of the air. But he turned around and saw him: what the polite describe as a street person and what Orff would prefer to call an obnoxious drunken bum. About forty, shorter even that Orff — an elf with mischievous eyes.

  “And wud ye happen to have a little spare change on ye, b’y? Oi has to make a phone call.”

  Orff tried to ignore him, and shouted out: “They own all the TV stations and all the newspapers and they’re controlling your minds.”

  “Nobody controls my mind, b’y.” He stuck out his hand. “Molloy, I’se a literary man, misself.”

  “Please move along.” Orff didn’t touch the little extended claw, and stepped back a foot — the man reeked of booze.

  Molloy began pawing through the books on the table. “You got any Farley Mowat, b’y? Jasus, these are all the same.”

  “Get out of there unless you’re willing to pay.”

  Molloy studied the cover. 1,000 LIES EXPOSED, it proclaimed. “What koind a shit is this?” he said, leafing through it.

  Orff felt one of his headaches coming on. “You’re living the big lie,” he called out. “Read how the press covered up the truth about Hitler.”

  Molloy squinted his eyes at Orff, as if trying to make out the small features in the tub of flesh. “Me dad got kilt in that war.”

  “Go away.”

  “How much are these, b’y?”

  “I am charging ten dollars. They normally go for twenty.”

  “Oi’ll take ’em all.” Molloy scooped as many as he could into his arms and proceeded down the street to a trash can on which was inscribed the words, KEEP YOUR CITY CLEAN. Orff ran after him, but by the time he tottered to the little man, Molloy had thrown the last of the books into the trash.

  “Okay, you’ve had it, buster.” Orff grabbed Molloy in a bear hug and they toppled to the sidewalk and struggled for a while there, Orff getting the worst of it, a couple of sharp knees under the stomach that had him gasping.

  After a few minutes of this a patrol car stopped, and a man and a woman in uniform got out and separated them.

  “Not again, Molloy,” said the policeman, holding him outstretched by his lapels, his feet dangling in the air. He turned to the woman officer.

  “This toime it’s self-defence, b’y. Oi was strugglin’ for me loif against a human blimp. He’s a dorty racist.”

  “I wish to prefer a complaint of robbery,” said Orff, brushing himself off, his good brown suit all grimy now. He began gathering his books from the trash can.

  “Okay, Molloy,” said the male officer, “causing a disturbance by fighting, you’re coming with us.”

  “Oi’ll take this to the hoighest court.”

  The policewoman was leafing through one of the books. She began wrinkling her nose.

  “
What are you doing with these?”

  “I’m selling them.”

  The officer paused at a page.

  “That chapter’s about the immigrants,” Orff said. “How they’re taking over.”

  “Your name?” she said.

  “Herbert Orff.”

  “These books are for sale?”

  “For only ten dollars.”

  “They’re normally twenty,” said Molloy. “It’s a hell of a deal, b’ys, for certain.”

  “I would like to buy one book,” the woman officer said.

  Orff tried not to show his surprise. This was an important customer: it was vital to educate the police. He took her ten dollars, his first sale.

  She then wrote him out a ticket for operating a business without a license on a public way, pursuant to the Street Licensing Bylaw.

  Orff stared at the ticket with dismay, looking from her to her partner, then collapsed onto the pavement and calmly lay there on his back.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the policeman asked.

  “I have gone limp. I am not going to co-operate in this travesty.”

  “But you’re not under arrest,” said the policewoman.

  “You’ll be sorry,” said Orff.

  His migraine took full effect, and he lay there and heard the voices laughing at him.

  ***

  Two days later a policeman came to Orff’s house with a summons. He was now also charged with the additional offence, under the Criminal Code, of selling hate literature. The conspiracy had broadened in scope.

  The charge read that he, Herbert Orff, did wilfully promote hatred by communicating statements in a book, to wit “A Thousand Lies Exposed,” contrary to Section 319 (2) of the Criminal Code of Canada. Orff went to the library and discovered that the offence carried a possible two years’ imprisonment.

  Orff thought a trial might be an excellent vehicle for exposing the truth: he would be in the public glare, the media couldn’t ignore him. How could he be convicted when he had historical facts on his side? But at the same time he realized there was risk — and he was terrified of jail. Shortly after getting the summons he suffered a horrifying nightmare about being raped and sliced up like bacon by a gang of racially mixed persons in black-and-white striped prison clothes. So despite his absolute distrust of lawyers he decided to retain one.

  He was turned down three times, by lawyers who claimed they were too busy or didn’t do this kind of work. Someone suggested he make contact with the Civil Liberties Association. That body referred him to the offices of Robinovitch, Barr, Barr, Tchobanian.

  So on this morning of Thursday, the last day of July, Orff found himself in those offices, waiting for Mr. Leon Robinovitch while munching on a bag of potato chips, his favourite food.

  There were several others in the waiting room, one of them a man in pigtails, obviously of North American Indian blood, though he tried to disguise it by wearing a suit. Orff didn’t believe Indians were necessarily inferior, but they were different. For instance, they were far better racially adapted than the white man to the hunting of caribou. Every race has its own specialties.

  The postman who just dropped off the mail, a Hindu: very good at jobs requiring walking. The receptionist was an Oriental. They were good detail persons, and made excellent secretaries. But Orff really didn’t like women — they always seemed to be laughing at him or something. They had their place, though.

  Now a man came in with a stomach almost as big as his own. He was dressed in a kind of leather jacket except it was sleeveless to the armpits, and he wore a military cap and had big tattoos all over. His name was in big letters on his jacket: HARLEY DAVIDSON.

  “I’m here to see Chuck Tchobanian,” he told the Chinese girl.

  Tchobanian — that sounded very foreign. Orff wondered if it was Jewish. Robinovitch, the man he was supposed to see, had a foreign name, too, Russian or something. A lot of Russians were atheists and communists.

  After a while a man who looked like a lawyer came in from outside, well-dressed, shiny black hair, slender, a suspiciously dark complexion. He was carrying a big box of books. He spoke to Harley Davidson: “Be with you in a sec. I’ve got a bunch more of these to bring up.”

  As he was leaving, one of the books slid from the pile, and Orff observed it lying face-up on the floor, a naked lady shackled to a wall. This was confusing to him, unsettling.

  The Chinese secretary picked up the dropped book, made a face, and said, “I think I’ll wait for the movie.”

  “Hi, babe.”

  She turned around quickly and looked at Orff. “Was that you?”

  Orff wasn’t sure. He’d heard the voice; it seemed to have come from where he was sitting.

  “No. Honest.” The secretary frowned. Orff piled into his bag of chips, feeling uncomfortable. Everyone was giving him funny looks, including Harley Davidson and the Indian.

  A handsome couple came hurrying out of the offices. “Pauline, we’re off to Montreal. I’ll be back tonight, and Ted is . . .”

  “Staying overnight. I’ll be in tomorrow in time for Mrs. Cartwright’s discovery.”

  “Mrs. Cartwright, how formal,” said the woman. She had big green eyes and red hair, Aryan for sure.

  They left together, carrying their briefcases.

  Orff became absorbed in the tattoos on the fat biceps of Harley Davidson, who was sitting beside him. He had an Iron Cross and . . . yes, that was definitely a swastika.

  In a low, confiding voice, Orff said: “I think we may be . . . on the same side.”

  Harley Davidson turned to him, wrinkled his nose. “Get away from me, ya faggot creep.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry.” Orff had finished his chips. He was still hungry. He was always hungry.

  Just then, one more man came out of the offices, with a long hawk’s nose and hair to his shoulders.

  “Orff, who’s Orff?”

  “That’s me, sir.”

  He looked Orff over, a puzzled expression on his face. This was his new lawyer, Orff guessed. Mr. Leon Robinovitch.

  The lawyer turned to the Indian. “Mr. Two Feathers, you’re here on that Hudson Bay arbitration.”

  “I sure am.”

  “Let me . . . get rid of Mr. Orff here first.”

  ***

  Leon didn’t offer to shake Orff’s hand, and placed him on a chair that was reasonably distant from his desk. On that desk, a copy of A Thousand Lies Exposed lay open. Leon had read to chapter three.

  All Leon knew about the man was from the newspapers, an item about his being charged.

  “They’re trying to suppress me,” Orff said.

  “Uh-huh,” Leon said. A fat, short butterball, two hundred and some pounds, he guessed. The man might seem a little hard to suppress.

  “I want to put them on trial, the people who run the system, the media barons, everyone dances off the end of their fingers. That’s what I should have told those police: they’re puppets.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “I told them they’d be sorry. That wasn’t strong enough. Toadies and bootlicks, that’s what I should have said.”

  “They’re part of the conspiracy,” Leon said.

  Orff paused. “Naturally I have to suspect that,” he said carefully.

  Leon tried to think of some way to kick this schmendrik out of his office fast.

  “Yes, well, I have a very busy practice, Mr. Orff. I really don’t think I can fit you into my calendar.” Then he made the mistake of asking: “Why did you come to me, anyway?”

  “The Civil Liberties Association said you’ll defend anyone’s right to express their thoughts. They said you’re not afraid of unpopular causes. I know I’m unpopular. I can’t even get a lawyer. I’ve been turned down by three of them.”

  Leon felt uncomfort
able. Orff had rung the right bell.

  “So you’ll be like the rest of them,” Orff said as he stood up to retrieve his book. “Afraid of the establishment. Or working for it.”

  Leon felt himself bristling. No one was more anti-establishment than Leon Robinovitch. He’d fought for the rights of the physically disabled, gays, unions, communists. He believed in free speech: it was a religion.

  “I take it you’re aware I’m Jewish.”

  “No. They should have told me that.”

  Leon felt relief, he would not have to turn the man away, his convictions need not be compromised. “On that basis do you still want me to defend you?”

  “At least you’re honest.” Orff seemed to ponder his situation, then said: “Well, I guess it’s okay you’re a Jew. You see, I don’t say Jews are inferior. They’re just different. It’s all in the genes. Just like the Negroid race makes good athletes, Jews make good lawyers. Every race has its specialty —”

  Leon felt his spirits plummet. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “Just like the others, afraid to rock the boat.” Orff started to rise. “You’ll be sorry.”

  “Sit down!”

  “Yes, sir.” He plumped back onto his chair.

  There was a lull. Leon, depressed, wondered if there was still a chance to get out of this with honour. But he felt badly about turning away the undefended, even the indefensible. A warped kind of civil libertarian-Jewish guilt.

  “Mr. Orff, I want to say something to you. I think you should be ashamed of yourself, you have some very twisted, wrong ideas. I would want that made clear at the beginning were I to defend you.”

  Orff merely nodded.

  Leon sighed. “All right, when do you appear in court next?”

  “Tomorrow. Friday.”

  “Understand this: I make the decisions. There will be no attempt to prove any of this garbage is true.”

  “Well, actually, I was thinking of a test case. I want to put them on trial, Mr. Robinovitch.”

  Leon found himself shouting: “Look, you can spew any kind of vomit you want to anywhere else, but I’m not going to help you do it in the courtroom.” He tried to calm himself. “I shall only take the point that the hate-literature law is unconstitutional. Contrary to the Bill of Rights. This is a free country and you’re the price we have to pay for that.”