Southern Cross Page 9

  “In some places they are, but over the years racism hasn’t been good business in Charleston. We’ll smoke them out eventually, but it will take time.” Last paused, then spoke in a gentler tone. “Sorry I got testy back there—when people don’t understand the dimensions of the problem, they can do more harm than good.”

  “I’m not out to change the world, Mr. Last; I’m just here to help a friend.”

  “I can’t quarrel with that. But here’s a word to the wise—the generals in these hate outfits may be educated and sophisticated, albeit sociopathic, but the troops tend to be as low on the pole as it goes.”

  “Which means?”

  “It’s like the song says, Mr. California Investigator—they’ve got nothing left to lose.”

  THIRTEEN

  When I tried to call Seth to report my conversation with Rick Last and talk about why Seth’s son would have said the words and thought the thoughts I’d heard him voice on the tape, his secretary told me Seth was still in court. When I went upstairs to thank Scar Raveneau for the pie and communication, the sign on her studio directed me not to disturb. Blocked at every turn, I checked the map, finished my carryout coffee, abandoned my Confederate Home, and set out on foot for the college.

  The air was soupy with heat and moisture. The natives were walking briskly toward their offices; the tourists were grouped attentively around their hired guides, who narrated the history of where they were by means of humorous anecdotes and harmless jokes. Before I’d walked three blocks, I had rolled up my sleeves and loosened my collar and considered donning short pants in public for the first time in twenty years.

  The people around me seemed less smitten by the heat than I was; one elderly black woman greeted another with an expression of thanks that the heat spell had broken. I marveled at that as I marveled once more at the city Seth Hartman had lured me to—it was scrubbed and painted and elegant and aloof, perfectly apposite to the Southern belle. Although I had tried to establish otherwise, as far as I could tell, it was entirely lacking in the ominous ether and discarded detritus of cities I was more familiar with. Seth had told me that until quite recently, the crime rate in Charleston was what it had been back in 1958. In the world that gave me my living, that qualified as a miracle.

  My route took me up Church Street, where I’d walked the night before, then over to Meeting Street past the Omni Hotel and the Confederate Museum. The latter seemed closed for repairs, which I took as a positive sign. Up close, the stores were even more exclusive than I’d supposed, worthy handmaidens to privilege and wealth and style. Charleston wasn’t New York or even San Francisco, but it wasn’t Akron, either.

  The map suggested I take a left on George Street, and two blocks later I was on the campus of the College of Charleston. It was a small institution, Seth had told me, with a long but undistinguished history, only recently aspiring to be much more than a finishing school. Over its formative years, the citizens of Charleston had, reportedly, been far more interested in debauchery than debate.

  Although the buildings were a skillful blend of regional and neoclassic styles, done up in earthy and pastel hues, the dominant architecture was not by man but Nature. Dozens of live oaks, ancient and majestic, draped the campus with a canopy that produced a shade that I welcomed with relish even though, according to the woman on the street, we were in the midst of a cold snap. After taking my bearings, I strolled through an ornamental arch and took a seat on a bench beneath a particularly leafy branch.

  Overhead, a giant C-141 transport rumbled by, military in makeup like those I’d seen lurking in the nether reaches of the airport, its passage so ponderous it seemed arrogant that it remained aloft. On the ground, several students filed past my resting place, not in the coarse and frenetic mobs of a Berkeley or San Francisco State, but in decorous clans of frivolity and fashion. The men looked chipper and oblivious, the women crisp and anachronistic in their sky-white dresses and ornamental hair. Their words were clever and carefree, doubtless a match for their lives. If there were darker personalities afoot—punks or stoners or even Democrats—I couldn’t see them from where I sat.

  When my shirt stopped sticking to my back, I got to my feet and began to roam. My effort not to look out of place endured only until I glanced at a reflecting window—in my scruffy brown hair and thick dark clothes and heavy leather shoes, I might have been off the boat from Minsk.

  I was looking for signs of ASP, but the more I saw of the campus and its inhabitants, the less likely it seemed that anything that impolitic could rear its head within these confines. For close to half an hour, I trod bricked and landscaped walkways, peeked into the dusky halls of silent buildings, smiled at students who seemed undisturbed and even flattered by my presence, and listened to the chirp and chatter of summertime, but saw nothing more sinister than come-ons for class rings and billboards for frat functions.

  At one point, I came across a gravestone, wedged between the library and a smaller wooden building, bearing a homespun message:

  NEAR THIS SPOT IS BURIED ELIZABETH JACKSON, MOTHER OF PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON. SHE GAVE HER LIFE CHEERFULLY FOR THE INDEPENDENCE OF HER COUNTRY, ON AN UNRECORDED DATE IN NOV. 1781, AND TO HER SON ANDY THIS ADVICE: “ANDY, NEVER TELL A LIE, NOR TAKE WHAT IS NOT YOUR OWN, NOR SUE FOR SLANDER. SETTLE THOSE CASES YOURSELF.”

  I smiled and moved along, wondering if the slanders that had marred Liz Jackson’s life had been any more searing than the televised smears that soil our own.

  As I passed the entrance to the library, I got an idea. Inside, the air was almost frigid. I enjoyed it for as long as I could without rousing suspicion, then asked at the reference desk if they had a collection of the school’s yearbooks. The woman behind the counter directed me to the second floor and to catalog number LD 891.

  The index to The Comet contained a single entry for Colin Hartman. On page 68, above the Debate Team and beside the Young Republicans, Colin and four of his peers lounged side by side in insolent black-and-white above a caption that referred to them as “Patriots.” There was no description of the club’s activities, no prop to suggest their passion. In this day and age, it could encompass anything from fascism to football.

  Colin himself looked contrived and convoluted, far too haggard for his age, entirely lacking his father’s svelte handsomeness and easy charm, capable of fronting for ASP and worse. I had hoped Seth was wrong, that whatever ASP was up to didn’t have its roots in his offspring, but I left the library more depressed than when I’d entered it.

  My mind on families and fanatics and the strains between fathers and sons, I was strolling down one of the shaded walkways when I noticed a sizable bulletin board that was tacked across the front of the Physicians Memorial Auditorium. On the board were notices of everything from work-study jobs to rock bands in need of drummers to rides to Columbia and Chapel Hill. As I was sidling to a place from which to read the postings more clearly, I noticed that among the idle onlookers was a young man with a more pointed purpose, a young man whose picture I’d seen in the yearbook only moments earlier, with his arm draped across the shoulders of Colin Hartman.

  He was short and stocky, overly muscled to the point that steroids came to mind, with hair shaved to his scalp and ears pierced with silver studs that were bent in the shape of swastikas. The tattoo of an iron cross was etched on the bulge of each swelled shoulder, and below that the word ARYAN. Rather than the rolled blue jeans and ungainly Doc Maartens favored by the West Coast skinhead sect, the Carolina model was wearing baggy surf shorts and well-worn topsiders and a shirt chopped off at his belly. Even allowing for his bald head and Metallica T-shirt, he still looked more attuned to volleyball than venom until I read the tattoo across his abdomen: THANK GOD I’M WHITE.

  When he had finished his work at the board, he backed away to admire it, then belatedly realized his efforts might not be met with universal acclaim and looked left and right to make sure no one was about to object. Satisfied his handiwork would last, he set off down t
he walk with the simian gait of an undersized athlete, pleased with his performance.

  After a closer glance at his leavings to make sure my sense of its message was right, I gave him some lead time, then set out in hot pursuit. A block later we were clear of the congestion of the campus, and I was as conspicuous as kelp on white sand.

  When he reached a corner across from a row of frat houses that were Victorian in structure and vulgar in decoration, my quarry glanced back the way he’d come and saw me. His smug features quickly bunched into a blend of defiance and panic, and he took off running, with easy speed and electric desperation. By the time I reached the corner, he was nowhere to be seen.

  When I got back to the bulletin board, someone had edited it. On the ground beneath the board, ripped into a dozen pieces, were the remnants of the poster the young man had been detailed to distribute. When I thought I could manage it in secret, I scooped up as many fragments as I could, then repaired to a secluded spot and fit them back together:

  A MESSAGE TO THE COLLEGE COMMUNITY

  from the ALLIANCE FOR SOUTHERN PRIDE:

  WHITE POWER!

  STUDY THE WORLDWIDE DESTRUCTION of the

  GREAT WHITE RACE

  DISCOVER the PLOT to deliver AMERICA

  to KIKES and COONS and SLOPES

  LEARN the TRUE and ONLY PATH to

  RESTORATION of the

  SOUTHERN WAY OF LIFE

  JOIN THE

  ALLIANCE FOR SOUTHERN PRIDE

  ASP

  =

  WHITE POWER

  =

  CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM

  555-2244

  JOIN US!

  I jotted the number in my notebook, then stuck the pieces of poster in my pocket and left the tranquil campus, feeling soiled and sad and very far from home.

  FOURTEEN

  I ducked into the first phone booth I came to and dialed the number printed on the bottom of the poster. What answered was a recorded recital by someone speaking in a deep, well-modulated voice, transmitting a message that was chillingly calm and casually evil:

  “You have reached the Charleston field headquarters of ASP—the Alliance for Southern Pride. To receive additional information about the war to save White America and preserve the Southern Way of Life, as well as instruction on how you can join hundreds of other white minds and bodies and become a warrior in the Purification Brigade, state your name and telephone number at the end of this recording, and ASP will contact you within the week.

  “As evidence of your commitment to the Southern Way of Life, we urge you to join hundreds of Purification warriors in a public protest to express our disgust at the maiming of white America through the plague of welfare immorality fostered by the Zionist Occupation Government as a means of crippling the white race and destroying Christian values. Our public proclamation of Southern pride will take place at Hampton Park on Tuesday next at six P.M.

  “Defensive uniforms only.

  “Thank you for your faith in the Alliance for Southern Pride, for your devotion to the Southern Way of Life, and for your support of the Purification Brigade.

  “Rejoice in your whiteness—purification is at hand.

  “Racially yours,

  “First Field Marshal Bedford.”

  At the end of the spiel, I gave my name and the telephone number of Seth’s office at the Home, then made note of the meeting place and time of the protest.

  When I called Seth’s office a second time, he was still in court. Amazingly, the booth I was using contained a usable directory, so I looked up Seth’s daughter in the real estate section. Chantrelle Hartman was listed at an address on East Bay Street. I consulted my map and headed that way.

  The firm was called Graves Realty. Its offices were on the second floor of a newish building one block west of the even newer park that lined the east side of the Charleston waterfront, on the site where a bustling string of docks and wharves had once served as the trading terminal for everything from indigo and rice to slaves and whiskey. I climbed to the second floor and entered the realm of realty.

  The receptionist was glazing her fingernails a salmon pink as she talked through a headset that freed her hands for manicures and similar delicate operations. The sign on her desk told me her name was Orchid Richards and her job title was Properties Coordinator. When she finally noticed me, her smile suggested she had dyed her nails to match her gums. When she wiggled her fingers, I assumed it constituted a more animated welcome, until I realized she was merely urging the polish to set.

  Orchid pointed to an empty chair. I followed instructions, got as comfortable as you can get on Naugahyde in summertime South Carolina, then looked and listened without appearing to do either.

  “Did he ask you to dance?… Really?… Not the shag. Don’t tell me Bubba Snowden did the shag in front of God and everyone.… I don’t want to hear what happened when he took you home.… Y’all best be careful, girl.… No, I don’t mean his wife; I mean his germs. I’m talking latex, Lula.… Good. Listen, honey, I got to do business. Talk to you tonight.… You, too. ’Baa.”

  After her unimprovable imitation of a famished lamb had vanished into the hum of the air conditioner, Orchid took the headset off her pelt of blond hair and smiled at me a second time. “The shag is like the jitterbug, only sexier? Bubba Snowden weighs three hundred pounds; Lula’s lucky she’s not maimed. What can we do for you on such a lovely morning, Mr. …?”

  “Tanner. Marsh Tanner. And you’re the loveliest thing I’ve seen all day.”

  Her smile was as congenital as her drawl—Orchid had heard it all before. “Why, thank you, kind sir. Such gallantry is unexpected from a Yankee like yourself, though most welcome, I assure you. Wherever did you learn such manners?”

  “California.”

  “What part?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “Well. I’m sure y’all are finding Charleston a much nicer environment than San Francisco.”

  She was sly enough to leave room in her editorial for me to guess whether the advantages were moral or meteorological.

  “Are you interested in acquiring property in the Low Country, Mr. Tanner?” Orchid continued with calibrated nonchalance, as though the subject were as randomly chosen as her hair color.

  “It’s a possibility. I’m just doing a little prospecting at this point.”

  “Of course. I’m sure Mr. Graves would be happy to make an appointment to show you some of our best—”

  “I’ve heard good things about Ms. Hartman,” I interrupted. “Would she be available?”

  Orchid glanced at her phone console and then at her watch. “Chantrelle is on the telephone at the moment. And she has a luncheon engagement at twelve and has to meet her mama at the Omni bar at two, so it’s going to be sticky. But if you’re available later this afternoon? I’m sure she can free up some time to see you.”

  “Why don’t you squeeze me in before lunch? Just for a second or two, so I can get an idea of the texture of the local market. I like Charleston a lot, but I’m still not sure I want to move major money out here.”

  Suddenly not a brainless decoration but a crafty opportunist, Orchid looked me over from head to toe. “Most people we see from out of town are interested in vacation homes. But you don’t strike me as a golfer or a fisherman, Mr. Tanner, if you don’t mind my saying so—you seem a trifle … intense for such diversions. So what kind of recreational activities are you interested in?”

  “The kind that make money.” Although it was badly rusted, I gave her my lawyer’s smile.

  “So you’re interested in investment property.”

  “Right.”

  “Improved or unimproved?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “We have a stunning new tract that’s just opened on the Isle of Palms. Near Wild Dunes?—I’m sure you’re familiar with Wild Dunes. Palmetto Pines, we call it. Here’s a brochure that describes the model homes and amenities; I’m sure you’ll appreciate its potential right
away.” She plucked a multicolored pamphlet from a stack on the corner of her desk and slid it my way as slyly as if she were slipping me her phone number.

  I let it sit there, becalmed and adrift. “Is Ms. Hartman off the phone yet?”

  My boorishness made her nervous—uncouth behavior often arrives with the implication that it has serious clout behind it.

  Orchid glanced at her console. “Just a moment, please.”

  I expected her to redon the headset, but she left her post and trotted down the hall. In her absence, I looked at the photographs of Charleston that lined the walls—there wasn’t a dark cloud or a black face in any of them.

  The brochure on the desk begged me to partake of its splendors, but I still played hard to get. Orchid was back in a flash. “Miss Hartman can give you five minutes,” she said breathlessly. “Then she really must prepare for her meeting.”

  “Fine,” I said, and followed Orchid back the way she’d come.

  I wouldn’t call Chantrelle Hartman beautiful, but she was much more than handsome, tall and self-assured, eager to do business and accomplished at customer cultivation. Her hair was brown and curled in loops like soggy shavings, her eyes were small and cool and calculating behind the lenses of designer eyeglasses. Her suit was dark blue, imprinted with tiny yellow flowers and cut close around her thighs; her shoes were white and high-heeled. Her legs were her best feature, and she knew it.

  It took her less than thirty seconds to have me in a comfortable chair with a view of the park and the palmettos, sipping a cup of good coffee in one moment while I lied through my teeth in the next. I kept at it until Orchid left the room and closed the door.

  “I’m sure you’re already aware that this is the best time for purchasing property in the Low Country in the last ten years.” Chantrelle began her pitch as the door squeezed shut with a burp.

  “How do you figure?”

  She was happy to flash some expertise. “Interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in decades, the inflation of the eighties has been squeezed out of price, and the market bottomed two months ago. There are definite signs of rebound, both commercial and residential.” Her smile was arid and adept. “I congratulate you, Mr. Tanner; you’re about to make some money. And I’d be pleased to help you do it.”