Trail of the Twisted Cros Read online

  “Now why does that sound so bad? Why does it sound so bad to say I’m working for white people? If I told you I was working for black people, it’d sound just fine and dandy, am I right?

  “If I’m guilty, like they say I am, I’m guilty, too, of saying out loud something that this cockeyed society of ours is saying we should be ashamed of saying. Why? Why should we be ashamed of being white men, any more than a black man should be ashamed of being a black man?”

  Rogers waited, and received the response he wished. The two marshals were nodding their agreement, involuntarily. What Rogers said made sense. How does a nice young man like this get himself convicted of murder conspiracy?

  “Let me tell you something, too, on the QT, okay?”

  The marshals nodded.

  “I’m not long for this place. One way or t’other.”

  Then Rogers beamed again. Someone yanked open the back door before the marshals could wipe the confusion off their faces.

  “Get him cuffed!” a guard said to the marshals.

  Johnny Lee Rogers, never one to be recalcitrant, extended his arms to the marshal who had allowed him freedom of movement for a few seconds. His wrists were clamped together.

  When he stepped out of the station wagon, the cameramen stampeded toward him, encircling him, shielding him from the tumult his presence inspired.

  Rogers searched the huddle of newsmen about him for a familiar face. Hoffman’s face.

  “Karl,” Rogers managed, his face stuck full of microphones, “it’s nice of you to be here.”

  Hoffman inched his way through the pack of photographers and reporters. When he neared Rogers, he gave the American Nazi leader—an unlikely leader in his proper navy blazer and gray gabardine slacks—a flat-palmed salute in the classic manner of the Third Reich greetings.

  As is so often the case with press stampedes, the clutter of reporters surrounding the famous personality didn’t know what to ask beyond, “What’s it feel like now, Johnny?”

  Rogers would be happy to help them get what they needed in the way of a capper for the film sequence.

  “Would it be all right with you boys,” Rogers asked the marshals who held him lightly by each arm, “if I just said something quick to these reporter fellows so we can get on with our official business here? You know they’ll just keep pestering us if I don’t.”

  “Sure, sure,” the marshals said. Then, to the assembled press members, “Short, okay? Then we got to get our man inside and processed.”

  It was a deal.

  Rogers and the marshals waited while the television cameras, in particular, were settled into the most favorable positions to capture this moment. When the lights went up, Rogers spoke:

  “My movement is unashamedly opposed to opening up this country to the sort of scum sent us from Cuba by Fidel Castro. This Communist leader in our hemisphere sent us perverts, whores, alcoholics, homosexuals, criminals, and the profoundly retarded. It was a trick, and we bit on it. We bit on it because we’re supposed to ignore perfectly normal racist instincts.

  “That is, we whites are supposed to believe that our little brown brothers are noble savages, one and all.

  “I hope, finally, that we’ve seen the light with this crowd of Cuban refugees, this crowd of misfits.

  “Our economy is in bad shape, our white workers are losing their jobs, and what does the government do? We spend God knows how much feeding and clothing and housing and employing this batch of scum from Cuba.”

  Rogers paused. He had issued his tirade without the slightest rise in his voice, calmly and deliberately, thoughtfully. He well knew the responsive chords he would touch that night at seven.

  “Now,” he continued, “that is our position. That is my position.

  “You may not agree with our position.” Rogers flashed his most winning grin. “I don’t suspect the press does, that’s for sure—”

  The press laughed on cue.

  “—but I know the press agrees with me that I have the right to freedom of expression, just as much right as any reporter.

  “And because of my exercising that right, just as I’ve done now, I found myself indicted by a United States grand jury for the crime of homocidal conspiracy. Yes, that’s all a grand jury requires, ladies and gentlemen. Johnny Lee Rogers ‘would tend to have motive,’ says the grand jury, and bingo, I’m indicted.

  “Then comes the trial. All circumstantial evidence. Not a single eye-witness to anything, and bingo, I’m convicted. All nice and neat. Lock up the Nazi.

  “Well, let me tell you out there listening to me tonight”—Rogers looked intently into the depths of all three network cameras trained on him, hanging on his every word—“I’m innocent of murder or murder conspiracy, folks. But the point is, because I think that scum like that Cuban refugee big-mouth should be shipped back to Havana, I was railroaded to prison.

  “I’m not sorry for what I think, whether you agree with me or not, and I’m not sorry that that Cuban they say I killed was killed. I just didn’t happen to do it, that’s all.

  “Maybe you folks out there listening have strong feelings about politics. Maybe you folks talk politics that lots of other folks don’t necessarily agree with. Do you think you should be in prison because you say what you think?

  “Of course not. That would be unAmerican. This is supposed to be the land of free speech. Remember the words, ‘I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.’ And remember, if I can be put away like this, eventually you can be put away, too.

  “One final thought,” Rogers said. He took a calculated breath. He could see the camera lenses moving in for a close-up, as he knew they would. Then he spoke:

  “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker!”

  Hoffman stepped in front of Rogers and addressed the press.

  “Thank you, gentlemen. I think that should be all. The authorities have their job now,” Hoffman said.

  The marshals took their cue, and cleared a path through the press throng to the prison gate. In a few seconds, Johnny Lee Rogers had entered, the gates shut behind him, leaving in his wake a parking lot full of nearly riotous demonstrators, and Hoffman to translate his last remarks.

  “It’s from Nietzsche,” Hoffman said, the reporters scribbling this in their notebooks. “It means, ‘What doesn’t destroy me, makes me stronger.’ “

  Chapter Two

  NEW YORK CITY, 8 September, 6:07 a.m.

  Like all law-abiding New York dog owners, or at least those dog owners who feel the eyes of passersby upon them, the tall man in the Burberry coat stood at the ready with a plastic sack and a day-old newspaper for scooping while the Airedale he accompanied sniffed at a fire hydrant on the corner of Third Avenue and East 65th Street.

  A light drizzle floated in the air, swirling up from the wet curbs by the occasional passing taxicab. Otherwise, most of Manhattan was still peacefully slumbering.

  The man in the Burberry scratched at the thick salt-and-pepper beard on his face, as if unaccustomed to the foliage. He, the dog, and a few brightly clad joggers with obsessive glints in their eyes were the only creatures at large at the dawn.

  He let the dog relieve itself in the vicinity of the fire hydrant as he peered through his dark glasses down East 65th Street to the yellow-shuttered townhouse at mid-block, number 142. When the dog had finished its business, he bent to work with the folded newspaper and the sack.

  While crouched, he noticed that finally the door of number 142 had opened. Two men, and then a third, filed out. Quickly, he finished cleaning up after the dog and dumped the sack into a trash bin. Then he walked briskly up Third Avenue.

  He didn’t have to look to know the identities of the three men who were now out on the avenue, heading uptown as well, about a block and a half behind him.

  He grinned and pulled his hat a bit lower over his dark glasses. He felt for the single sheet of paper inside his breast coat pocket, patted it, and continued up Third
toward the newsstand at East 72nd Street.

  The men behind him behaved as if everything so far this morning outside the protection of number 142 East 65th Street was perfectly safe.

  Once, he was nearly tempted to turn around and look, just to make sure his quarry was following. But he resisted the urge. He had cased this route… how many times? At least a dozen. Maybe more. Always with the Airedale in tow. A man walking a dog is a safe man, right? Nothing out of the usual about him.

  Again he congratulated himself with an inner laugh. Oh, this would be rich! Would it be kept quiet, or be made public?

  Now he was almost to the newsstand. Only a half-block more…

  A photographer and a newspaper reporter caught up with the three men who had exited 142 East 65th. The reporter spoke to the man in the center, a wavy-haired fellow with a slight hunch to his shoulders, a large sloping nose, jowls recognizable by years of cartoon caricatures, and a pair of shifting, coal-black beady eyes.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” the reporter said to the beady-eyed man, “I’m from the Daily News, my photographer and myself, that is… we’d like to do a story about your morning walks through the neighborhood, if you don’t mind.”

  One of the men flanking the beady-eyed man pushed forward to the reporter. His partner barked to the photographer, “No photos!”

  The reporter and photographer pulled out their press credentials at the suggestion of the beady-eyed man, and the two bodyguards were satisfied.

  “Maybe you boys should have checked this through the office first,” the beady-eyed man suggested. He resumed walking toward East 72nd Street. The two men from the Daily News fell into step with him.

  “But in any case, sure, come on along. Do your story. Why not? I only have the Secret Service for company most mornings, you know.”

  One of the two Secret Service agents pulled the reporter aside and whispered into his ear: “Little friendly advice, Bub. No questions on Watergate, and you won’t upset the boss, okay?”

  The photographer was dancing around his subject.

  The reporter told the Secret Service agent, “Yeah, yeah, okay. This is just a piece of fluff anyway.”

  Up the avenue, the man in the Burberry coat was only a few steps away from the newsstand. He fished a quarter out of his pocket and removed the piece of paper from his coat. He could resist it no longer. He looked behind him.

  “What… ?”

  He said it aloud, then hushed himself.

  Of all times, he thought. How did the press find out? The same way he did, of course. They hung around the neighborhood watching for patterns, and then caught the man one day. This might spoil everything.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself. He didn’t want to betray his annoyance in front of the newsstand dealer. The dealer might be blind, but he certainly could hear. He could probably hear quite a bit better than most people, which is why he had to be careful with the piece of paper.

  He looked back toward his quarry. The man with the beady eyes was talking animatedly with the reporter, but he was heading right toward the newsstand, intending this sidewalk interview to be merely a moving diversion from the usual pattern of the morning constitutional.

  … Yeah, it just might work anyhow. Maybe better, with the press all over him. Oh, this would be rich!

  “Morning, Robert,” he said to the newsstand dealer.

  The dealer’s face turned in the general direction of the voice. Unseeing eyes, rheumy and pale, settled on him.

  “Wet enough for you?” the bearded man asked. He handed the dealer a quarter and said, “For the Times.”

  “Thank you,” the dealer said, a Cuban inflection in his voice. “It’s wet enough all right, you bet.”

  As he spoke, the man in the Burberry coat slipped his piece of paper inside the top copy of the New York Times pile.

  “Take care now, Robert,” he said.

  Then he crossed the street, stepped into a telephone booth and deposited a dime into the machine. He dialed a number and waited for an answer. While he waited, he watched as Richard Nixon, the two Secret Service agents, and the press approached Robert’s newsstand.

  “… so I like to see people,” Nixon said to the reporter from the Daily News. “I like to see them react, you know. Like… watch this.”

  Nixon took a few steps away from the reporter and the others, to where a taxicab waited outside an apartment house entrance. Inside the cab, a driver dozed. Nixon tapped on the driver’s window.

  The startled driver sat up, the cigar clenched in his teeth falling from his mouth to his lap. Fortunately, it was not lit. On the other hand, it was wet and gummy from several hours’ chewing.

  “Hi there, buddy,” Nixon said.

  The driver sputtered something, and then rolled down his window.

  “Hey, you Nixon?” he asked.

  “Yes sir. I just wanted to say good morning to you.”

  “Well, what the fuck!”

  “Have a great day,” Nixon said. Then he stepped back onto the sidewalk.

  The cab driver’s head hung out the window and his eyes hung out of his head.

  “See what I mean?” Nixon asked the reporter.

  Nixon and entourage were now at Robert’s newsstand. They didn’t notice the man in the telephone booth across busy East 72nd Street, a wide cross-town thoroughfare.

  “Good morning, Robert,” Nixon said. “Let me have the usual.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

  Robert picked off the Times, the Daily News, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal from the piles spread out before him. He held out his hand for payment after giving the newspapers to one of the Secret Service agents, who tucked them under an arm without looking at them.

  “… Now here’s something interesting,” Nixon said to the reporter. “Robert here is blind, you know. But he comes to work every morning, just like everybody else. He doesn’t sit at home on his butt.”

  The reporter made a face for the benefit of his photographer colleague.

  Before leaving the newsstand, Nixon noticed the coffee can Robert had set out this morning. A can with a sign on it which read, “Help the Cuban refugees.”

  Nixon placed a ten-dollar bill in the can.

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Robert said, cocking his ear to hear the soft dropping sound as the bill went into the can.

  “That’s okay, Robert, that’s perfectly okay.”

  Across the street, the man in the telephone booth was speaking into the receiver:

  “He’s got it. It’s the same as every day… now they’re heading across Third to the coffee shop. He’ll be yapping with the reporters for a while, I suppose, then he’ll get it.”

  He nodded his head in response to something said on the other end of the line, then hung up the phone.

  As Nixon and the other men stepped through the doorway into Kasey’s coffee shop, he hailed a taxicab. In a few seconds, he was gone, Airedale and all.

  “… now I suppose I’ll have to treat—eh, boys?”

  Nixon laughed at his own remarks and ordered coffee all around from a sleepy-eyed counterman, studiously unmoved by the presence of a former President of the United States, or, one would suspect, the Second Coming of Christ.

  “So, my social life revolves around baseball games at Yankee Stadium—did you know Stein-brenner lets me sit in his personal box?—and Broadway shows. We saw Ginger Rogers, too, of course, at Radio City. And Pat and I entertain at home some; we’ve had our neighbor—you know, David Rockefeller. Henry’s been over, too.

  “I like to walk in Central Park if I get a chance. Usually early in the morning, like this, when I can talk these guys into going over that way.” Nixon pointed to his Secret Service guards.

  The reporter asked about his phlebitis.

  “Oh, that’s gone, gone entirely away. My health is fine, tip-top. Walking like I do every morning is the best medicine of all, don’t you know.”

  He was asked about
New York, how he liked his new city.

  “Well, you know, Pat and I have lived here before, a couple of times. First time was right after the war. Yep, we had this dandy little walk-up on the West Side, just down from Central Park. Cost us ninety dollars a month then, which was a lot, let me tell you.

  “But, we left New York for California. That’s home, I guess. I ran for Congress and the rest is history.

  “Then, we came back here to New York after the sixty-two gubernatorial race back home in California. I practiced law and we lived on Fifth Avenue, 810 Fifth Avenue.

  “Course, in sixty-eight, we moved to Washington.”

  Nixon laughed. The Secret Service agents laughed. The reporter checked his wrist watch.

  “And now we’re back in Gotham,” Nixon said. He sipped his black coffee, noisily.

  “I love New York, you know,” he said. “Any town that can be for the Mets can be for the underdog.”

  The photographer now made a face for the reporter, who checked his wrist watch again.

  “Yeah, New York is a wonderful town,” Nixon said. “There’s nowhere in the world like New York. I love it. I love the little people who make this city great!”

  The reporter asked a few more quick questions, the photographer snapped a couple of pictures of Nixon at the counter, his elbows all over the place, and then the reporter said something about making deadline, and the press was gone.

  Nixon slowly finished his coffee, ordered a refill, and then gestured to the Secret Service agent with the newspapers. The papers were shoved across the counter to Nixon, who first checked the Daily News back page for the principal sports story of the day. He skimmed the two lead stories on page one of the Wall Street Journal, said something irreverent about the Washington Post as he glanced at the banner headline, then spread out the New York Times for a closer going-over.

  When he had finished the front page, Nixon opened the paper and at first didn’t notice the sheet of white paper that fluttered down from the counter to his lap.

  “What’s that?” one of the Secret Service agents asked, pointing to the paper between Nixon’s legs.