Hunter Read online

  It was entirely normal, of course, to care more about some people than others, to want to protect some and to see others destroyed. The difference between him and them was that he didn’t try to deny that fact — and that he wanted to protect his own and to destroy those who threatened them, while they seemed to hate their own and to love those who were utterly unlike themselves.

  He had read enough literature from the 18th and 19th centuries — even from the first half of the 20th century — to be quite certain that his own values used to be the norm. How had the inversion of values taken place? He shook his head drowsily. That was something he never had been able to puzzle out, even when he was wide awake. Well, the answer could wait. He knew what he had to do, and tomorrow he intended to strike another blow.

  “More coffee, sir?”

  IV

  “Yes, please,” Oscar told the waiter, as he placed the money for his check on the tray, mentally flinching at the amount. He leaned back in his chair and continued to survey the other tables in the restaurant, while a busboy approached to clear away the last of his dishes. He had chosen his table well for the purpose. It was in a dark alcove, partly screened from the main dining area by a large potted plant, so that Oscar could see without being seen. The restaurant was a pretentious, trendy one, just five blocks from the Capitol and frequented by the city’s power seekers, as well as by a fair number of real power wielders: legislators, upper-echelon bureaucrats, lawyers, newsmen, lobbyists.

  During the course of his dinner Oscar had spotted several interesting prospects at other tables. He recognized Congressman Stephen Horowitz in a boisterous, noisy group just two tables away. Horowitz had been much on television recently, as his committee held hearings on a new bill to bring 100,000 Haitian immigrants per year into the United States. In an emotional speech just a week before, he had denounced those who opposed his bill as the very same “racists” who had been against his earlier bill, since enacted into law, to ban White South Africans from immigrating into the country. What a hideously ugly little man he was, Oscar thought, feeling a distinct itch in his trigger finger as he studied the legislator’s ratlike face, with its darting, beady, close-set black eyes and wide, leering mouth. But, really, shooting was too good for Horowitz. Oscar would much rather wait for a chance to catch the man alone and work him over with an ice pick, slowly.

  Besides, he didn’t want to change targets that radically yet; he wanted to keep hitting mixed couples for a while, except now he intended to pick them from a higher tax bracket, in order to make an even bigger splash in the news media. And there was an excellent possibility at a table on the other side of the room, which Oscar unobtrusively had been keeping an eye on for the last half hour: a tall, light-skinned mulatto with two White women, both of whom seemed to be on intimate terms with him. Oscar had no idea who the women were, but he had seen the mulatto on the television news several times — once, in fact, with Horowitz, in a news conference held in the street in front of the South African Embassy. He headed an organization which lobbied for punitive legislation against South Africa and economic aid for Black-ruled African countries. Perhaps the women were employees of his organization, or perhaps just a couple of power groupies, a species all too common in this city.

  Finally the mulatto paid his bill, then sauntered over to Horowitz’s table to pay his respects, one of the women hanging on each arm. Oscar rose and left the restaurant without looking again toward his intended targets. Outside he paused at a coin-operated newsrack and purchased a Washington Post. From the corner of his eye he saw the mulatto and his White companions emerge from the restaurant and turn to the left, down a tree-lined and imperfectly lighted sidewalk. Oscar followed at about 30 paces.

  As soon as he was out of the brightly lighted area in front of the restaurant, he slipped his silenced pistol out of his coat and into the folded newspaper he was holding in his right hand. The trio in front of him turned the corner. By the time Oscar reached the corner they were entering a late-model, white Cadillac parked at the curb. He quickly scanned the area and sized up the situation, feeling the familiar tension in his muscles, the icy perspiration in his armpits. Although there was a moderate amount of traffic on the street with the restaurant, there were no moving vehicles on the side street. The nearest pedestrians were a group of five persons he had just passed on their way toward the restaurant; they were at least 100 feet away now, their backs to him.

  Oscar increased his stride and drew abreast of the Cadillac as the mulatto closed the front passenger door on the two women. Oscar turned sharply to the right and intercepted him at the curb behind the automobile. As the mulatto looked up with surprise and annoyance at the large White man suddenly blocking his path, Oscar raised his pistol, still covered by the newspaper, and shot his victim between the eyes. The mulatto fell back heavily against the vehicle without uttering a sound, then sprawled into the gutter. Oscar fired two more carefully aimed shots into his head, then stepped forward and jerked open the door of the Cadillac. The women had not realized what was happening, and Oscar quickly and precisely shot each of them in the head once, then twice more. Then he turned and strode briskly back toward the main street.

  Oscar glanced at his watch as he drove back across the Potomac into Virginia: just eight o’clock — still not too late to see Adelaide. He had told her he would be having dinner with some contract officers at Andrews Air Force Base that evening and would give her a call if he got away early. It hurt him to lie to her, but he could see no other way of dealing with the situation. The girl was intelligent and had basically good instincts, but he had no intention of burdening her with the knowledge of — and therefore the moral responsibility for — his private war. She had not been through the experiences in Vietnam he had, nor had she shared his prolonged soul-searching for an understanding of the meaning of many of the things happening around them — such as miscegenation. He was not at all sure that he would be able to make her accept the moral necessity of his actions. Like all women, she was much more likely to focus on the personal aspects — on what was happening to the individuals Oscar chose as targets — than on the impersonal justification for those actions and their implications for the future of the race.

  Oscar had had to harden his resolve tonight to kill the two girls. He had no doubt at all that what he had done was right, but there was something in him that resisted doing violence to a woman of his race — even when she clearly deserved it. It had been easier in the supermarket parking lots. All of those women were obviously of the lowest type — worthless White sluts who had married Blacks because they had no better prospects among men of their own race. But the girls tonight had been moderately attractive, even classy. Too bad.

  As for the mulatto, there definitely had been more satisfaction for Oscar in killing him than the other Blacks. Partly it was because this one had publicly declared himself an enemy of the White race by his actions against the Whites of South Africa, and partly it was because he was such an arrogant, swaggering, uppity nigger. Maybe, too, it was because the girls with him might have amounted to something under different circumstances. In any event, Oscar suspected that his increased satisfaction soon would be matched by increased anguish in the ranks of the enemy.

  His suspicion was confirmed later that evening. He and Adelaide were sitting up in bed to watch the 11 o’clock news together, as they often did. Tonight the presentation was ragged and disorganized, the obvious result of the news team having gotten the tape of the day’s big story too late to edit it. Without any preliminaries the newscaster began, “It looks like the race killer has struck again!”

  Oscar watched with fascination as the camera scanned the scene of his activity a mere three hours ago, now swarming with uniformed policemen, FBI agents, newsmen, and curious bystanders. FBI agents already had arrested a suspect and were questioning him, according to the newscaster. That brought an involuntary smile to Oscar’s lips.

  The real focus of the news was on the mulatto Oscar
had killed, Tyrone Jones. There was only a cursory mention of the two White women, and then a long eulogy on Jones and his role in “the struggle for freedom and equality in South Africa.” Senator Horowitz gave a brief interview, mentioning that he had been with Jones only a few minutes before the latter was shot, and that he had lost a “dear, dear friend.” Horowitz went on to say that he intended to call for a Congressional investigation of the Jones shooting and the other killings of racially mixed couples. Then he leaned toward the camera with a twisted leer on his face: “Anyone who thinks that he can halt the progress we are making in race relations, in our efforts to break down the old barriers of hatred and prejudice separating the races, by these murders is terribly mistaken. We will put all of the resources of our government behind the endeavor to track down the sick killer or killers responsible for them. America will continue its march toward a fully integrated society, and no one will be permitted to stand in the way.”

  Then there was five seconds with the distraught parents of one of the women who had been shot. Adelaide shook her head in sympathy and murmured, “How terrible!”

  “If she was with that Jones creature, she deserved to be shot,” Oscar responded.

  “Oh, Oscar! How can you say that? That’s awful.”

  Oscar sighed and said nothing, but he thought to himself that he was going to have to begin talking with Adelaide about some things — soon.

  V

  Oscar carefully laid aside the sheaf of clippings which he had assembled in his lap, stretched, yawned, leaned all the way back in his easy chair, and shut his eyes. It had been a busy week, and he needed a little time to think. He was almost grateful that Adelaide’s mother was ill and Adelaide had flown back to Iowa for the weekend to be with her. He had spent all of this quiet Saturday morning reading news reports and editorial comment from more than a dozen magazines and newspapers he had picked up at the newsstand last night after dropping Adelaide off at the airport.

  Much of the news and comment were about him — and related matters.

  For the past ten days there had been hardly anything else in the news. Two days after the Jones hit — Wednesday of last week — the media reported the bombing of the home of a racially mixed couple in Buffalo and the machine-gunning from a passing car of a racially mixed group of people standing in line to get into a San Francisco discotheque noted for its mixed clientele. Seven persons had been killed and a dozen more wounded in the latter incident, and the police had arrested two White suspects. There were no leads in the Buffalo bombing.

  On Thursday, almost buried in the continued media hullabaloo over the San Francisco shooting, accounts were given of the killing in Chicago of two White women — sisters — alleged to have been involved with Black men, and the severe beating of a racially mixed couple in their apartment in Philadelphia.

  Then the dam burst. On Friday there were reports of 19 major attacks on racially mixed couples or groups around the country. For the first time there was the admission that there were a number of different activists at work, although in each case reference was made to “the Washington hate killer,” and the incidents outside the Washington area were described as the work of “copycats.” Arrests had been made in more than half the incidents.

  Oscar shook his head with disbelief as he read the details. Most of those who were copying him appeared to be acting with incredible carelessness. It was as if they were all good ol’ boys who had been sitting around with a beer in hand watching TV reports of one of his own exploits and had said to themselves, “Hey, neato! I think I’ll do that too.” And then they had gone out and done it, with only the most childishly inadequate preparation and planning. Weren’t there any serious people left in America?

  More encouraging were the skinheads, who had taken up Oscar’s banner with real enthusiasm. There were many of them, they were highly visible, and they had no hesitation at all about wading into a racially mixed group with baseball bats, bicycle chains, and bricks. Whatever they did, of course, was wholly unplanned and more often than not was not lethal — although in one case a mixed couple had been knifed to death on a Cleveland street by several of them. On the whole, the race-mixers seemed to be more worried about encounters with roaming gangs of skinheads than with lone assassins.

  The worry, in fact, had reached the point that mixed couples were openly expressing their fear of being seen in public. One news magazine reported that some White women in the Los Angeles area who formerly would have taken their mixed-race children shopping with them were now leaving them with neighbors instead. There was an interview with a Washington restaurant owner who estimated that the number of mixed couples at his tables had dropped off by more than eighty per cent since the attacks began being reported by the media.

  The reaction by the System was vehement, vicious, and massive. Oscar was surprised. He had expected much media excitement and a major police effort, but he had never imagined there would be quite such an outpouring of rage and hatred. Some of the politicians, churchmen, educators, and others who had expressed themselves on TV had been almost incoherent with emotion. One Christian evangelist had been shaking uncontrollably — not with sorrow but with anger — when he denounced the attacks on racially mixed couples as an unholy attempt to thwart “God’s plan for America.” A rabbi with similar sentiments was literally frothing at the mouth. The president of Yale University, Baldwin Giaccomo, wept as he confessed his “shame that I am White… [and] have skin of the same color as the sick, demented creatures” who were carrying out the racial attacks.

  As he watched that last performance Oscar had idly wondered how the good scholar would respond if it were suggested to him that some of the attacks might be the work of Black separatists — Farrakhan’s Muslims, say — who had the same reasons for being opposed to miscegenation that racially conscious Whites had.

  At the same time Oscar had realized that reason played no part in what he was witnessing. In some sense of the word all of these spokesmen were motivated by religious sentiment, even though a few of them might declare themselves as agnostics or atheists. They were motivated by a religious conviction that a racially mixed America was better than a White America, that a mulatto child was better than a White child, that a White woman who chose a Black mate was better than one who chose a White. They would deny it if the question were put to them starkly, Oscar knew; they would weasel and waffle and beat around the bush with platitudes about “human dignity” and “equality” and so on, but it was perfectly clear what they really believed.

  Somehow Oscar had known all along that that was the way things were. He thought again of the hatred he had seen on the face of the young woman demonstrator in front of the South African Embassy and of the approval for that hatred on the face of the priest beside her. And yet he was still surprised. He knew that America had become thoroughly decadent, that decadence had grown deep roots, and that many segments of the population obtained their sustenance from those roots and would fight any attempt to pull them up. But this reaction to his attacks on miscegenation went far beyond the defense of vested interests. Oscar shook his head in wonder. There clearly was an unbridgeable gulf — not just in interests, but in understanding, in spirit — between himself and these people.

  The printed commentary was more coherent than the televised statements but just as vicious. There were editorial calls for new Federal legislation imposing an automatic death penalty on anyone convicted of a racially motivated assault-and one of the most impassioned of these was from an editor who had for years been noted as an opponent of capital punishment.

  The director of the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a lengthy letter to the editor of the NewYork Times that the ordinary civil rights of a criminal suspect should be suspended in the case of a White accused of attacking a non-White for racial reasons. A third writer — a Massachusetts legislator — proposed that, because of the difficulty in proving motivation, whenever a suspect was White and his victim non-White, the burden of p
roof be shifted to the defendant; he must prove that his actions had not been racially motivated in order to avoid the special penalties provided for “hate crimes.”

  The prize for malice, however, was taken by one of the Washington Post’s regular columnists, David Jacobs. He had asserted in his column last Friday that it was clear from the pattern of killings in the Washington area and from the attacks on racially mixed couples elsewhere that the attackers were sexually frustrated White males who resented the greater sexual attraction which Black males had for White women. He provided a historical backdrop by attributing the same motive of White sexual inadequacy to the lynchings of Blacks earlier in the century. Jacobs then went on to generalize, saying that all White racism had its roots in sexual envy. White racism would continue to be the greatest evil confronting the world until there was no longer a White race, he concluded, and the best thing for the government to do was to hasten that day by encouraging even more racial intermarriage. A tax break for mixed couples would be a good step in that direction, he opined.

  That column had infuriated Oscar when he first read it eight days ago. Rereading it today he could only wonder about people like Jacobs. What motivated them? Jacobs seemed to be in a different class from Yale’s guilt-stricken president or the outraged ministers and politicians. The words of his column radiated pure, cold hate. To him the White race was like a strain of especially dangerous spirochetes for which an antibiotic needed to be found.

  At least, Oscar thought with considerable satisfaction, Jacobs would be writing no more columns for the Post. He had resolved to see to that himself last week, as soon as he had read Jacobs’ column. And he had carried out his resolve within a few hours.