‘You never got to train your soldiers either. We picked up the tail miles back.’
‘You was supposed to.’
Ted Bell folded his arms and leant on the white rail, the Reverend continuing to present the back of a head. Posturing, lack of respect. Even Martin Luther King had done the decent thing, proffered his face to the cross-hairs of a rifle-sight as he stood on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on 1 April 1968. April Fool. Azania was from the same tree; he had simply swung from another branch. The joke would be on him, his entire race. Bell coughed, a real estate millionaire clearing his throat, a white supremacist in a grey silk suit wearing a genuine Rolex with bona fide hand-sweep action.
‘Noticed the signs cautioning against snakes,’ he mused aloud, meaningfully.
Azania swivelled slowly on his heel and gazed at him. ‘They also warn about disease-carrying parasites.’
‘Those things that came over on the slave ships, right?’ He gave a brief smirk, saw the venom-rush in the black leader’s eyes. Careful, he might get out his cooking-pot.
Appraising stares locked, and held. Circling. The big fight had dawned, the warm-up and psych-out begun. Everything was ready: the canvas, the arena, the participants. The show would be historic, Nietzschean in scope, global in scale. It would pit race against race, neighbour against neighbour. As it should be, Bell thought, as it should be. Only through devastation, direct confrontation, could humankind be tested, cleansed ethnically, purified totally. Superman triumphant, lesser man vanquished. A was for America, Apple-pie, Amorality packaged as morality. A was for Aryan; A was for Atlantis. He had been raised on the creed, weaned on it, schooled on it. A militia mindset could come wrapped in a hundred different guises, dressed in smart clothing, Gucci loafers, and transported in a top-of-the-range Mercedes saloon. White was right. It said so in the Bible, said so in the Turner Diaries, said so in the Edmund Kiss novels that told of the superior Nordic Atlanteans, their growth from seeds carried by an ice moon plunging into the northern hemisphere, their battles with the primitives of the south. And their eventual victory. That was important. They were his ancestors, his birthright. He would not fail their memory, betray their legacy. For years he had built the organization, found like-minds and deep pockets to rebuild the ethos and apparatus of the Citizens Council, armed and trained its paramilitary Forresters. Deep South, deeply held convictions. General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate commander at the 1864 Fort Pillow massacre in which black Union soldiers were murdered after having surrendered, founder and Grand Wizard of the gentlemen terrorists of Pulaski, Tennessee, who sought to stem the tide of freed slaves and drain on plantation profits, who dubbed themselves the Klan. Quite a leader, quite a name.
‘Black king takes white pawn every time,’ Azania said at last.
‘Stick to God and preaching, Reverend, leave the moves to us.’
‘That would be unsporting.’
‘Then concentrate on your defence.’ He unwrapped a stick of gum into his mouth.
‘I am.’ Azania’s eyes lifted skywards towards the undulating clatter-buzz of a distant helicopter. ‘You like my opener?’
Considered chewing. ‘Neat in places, I gotta hand it to you. That combination car bomb and drive-by that took out Bob Hewitt and his escorts on the PCH? Very dramatic, highly professional, truly innovative.’
‘My display team aims to please.’ It had aimed to eradicate.
‘Oh, it’s done that. Press hounds and bloodhounds will be busy.’
‘They’re worth a thousand foot-soldiers, ten thousand homicides.’
‘For sure, Reverend. Where would we be without publicity?’
‘Without mass hysteria, media hype, police briefings, journalistic endeavour?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘Underground.’
‘And underground’s bad for oxygen supply, bad for our health and our prospects.’ Bell eased himself from the railing and went to sit at a picnic table close by. ‘Me? I prefer the great outdoors.’ He scanned the panorama, a skyline that would one day turn red, and breathed deep through his nostrils. Everything that had been before – segregation, church burning, lynching, riot, the tensions of the past – was foreplay, child’s play. His Citizens Council versus Azania’s Union League, the Forresters versus the Tigers. Now was the time, the culmination.
Azania had moved away on the summit and spread his arms. ‘The American salad bowl.’
‘And we get to toss it.’
‘Quite a responsibility, Mr Bell.’
‘Responsibility?’ Methodical mastication. ‘It’s a divine mission.’
‘I won’t disagree. You believe in Original Sin?’
‘Mighty original – bringing you folk to the United States.’
‘We will wash our spears in your blood, we will atone, we will fight like the impis of Shaka and Cetawayo, encircle and bring low the cities with the buffalo horns of our armies, drink from the gall-bladders of the defeated. We will make amends for what we have not done and what we have allowed to be done to us.’
‘Pretty speech. Guess Tinsel Town won’t be doing black-white buddy-buddy movies no more.’
Azania was wiping his mouth with a white handkerchief. ‘I always found them a little patronizing.’
‘Blacks as computer geniuses, as criminal masterminds, as brilliant surgeons, scientists, unrivalled investment bankers, peerless detectives. I always found them a little misrepresenting.’
‘Don’t underestimate us, Mr Bell.’
‘I would never do that with the enemy.’
‘So, let’s deal.’
He took the bench opposite, laying his hands flat on the table. There were no tourists here at this time of day, no joggers or hikers at this time of the week. They were alone, the field generals of two rival forces, in conference. Negotiation was not the aim, witnesses were not required. This was the apex of prejudice, the logical consequence of American interest-politics and the belief that one group should have more rights, more say, more claim, more compensation, more slack, more extenuation, than any other. Death of hypocrisy on Inspiration Point. Azania and Bell spoke for an hour.
The white man rose. ‘LAPD are better prepared than ’92.’
‘For riot, not for war.’
‘Point taken.’
The Police Department’s Mobile Field Force, civil disorder-trained officers, tactical vehicles, beanbag and rubber-baton rounds, would be no match for military firepower. The National Guard would suffer the same mauling.
Azania’s forehead puckered into a frown as he raised his sightline towards the adversary. ‘God is dead. You’d best be getting down the mountain.’
