A Mighty Fortress Read online

  “I can see why, sir!” replied Cody with an awestruck, slack-jawed grin that would have done credit to any one of the Brady Bunch. Yeah, and you’re looking at one, you swaggering ape! Maybe I can make you my notch number two! he thought.

  As part of his newfound piety Cody also met Emily’s mother, and in fact more often than not they attended church as a trio, which gave them even more plausible cover. Janet Pastras was absolutely enthralled with him. “I’m so glad she’s found a nice Christian boy like you, all polite and clean-cut, after she almost went to the devil, when she was running around with that Satanic rock and roll man” said Mrs. Pastras, hugging him, the odor of a fine Chardonnay mixing with her perfume. “I always tried to raise my little girl up to know the Lord and walk in his ways, but she keeps running around. And look what happened! I tell you, Cody, I have nightmares about my little girl in the hands of those beasts on that terrible night! Satan’s emissaries on earth!” She shivered.

  “Well, ma’am, I think maybe getting captured by the Jerry Rebs might have scared Emily straight,” Cody told her. “I understand that the one that kidnapped her was a real monster, Conan the Barbarian with machine-gun belts across his chest!” Behind her mother’s back, Emily stuck out her tongue at him.

  Cody was surprised to find that Emily lived in a suburban mansion in Bellevue which was at least as luxurious as the Shipman home, albeit rather disorderly and seldom vacuumed since the Pastras’ last Nicaraguan maid had fled in fear of the NVA. One day when they were driving to a prayer breakfast without Emily’s mother, who was still in bed with a hangover, Cody mentioned this. “Yeah, my Dad used to have the biggest Ford dealership on the west coast once,” said Emily. “He was making truckloads of money but he always wanted more, and to be honest, Daddy didn’t have much sense. He got involved in all kinds of stuff with the Russian mob, here in Seattle and up in Vancouver, smuggling drugs and computer parts, working welfare and Medicaid scams, and God knows what else. One day when I was ten years old he just disappeared. They dug him up out of a cranberry bog about a year later. Mom still can’t deal with it. She has convinced herself that he was on some kind of secret government mission or something and every now and then she’ll make some remark about him being martyred for Christ. He was a pretty cool guy, although even when I was little I knew he was a crook. But he left us well provided for, plenty of insurance and all kinds of real estate and bank accounts all over town. Plus every now and then Mom or I will find a pile of hundred dollar bills in some little hole in the wall in this house, or up in the skylight someplace. It’s kind of like a long Easter Egg hunt.”

  “Uh, the Russian mob aren’t really Russian, at least not most of them,” Cody told her.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Emily.

  “Looks like we both lost our fathers to the kikes.”

  “Oh, how so?” she asked. They pulled up into the church parking lot and Cody turned off the ignition and sighed.

  “Well, if we’re going to be working together, I suppose you have a right to know who I am and what the hell I’m doing here. Bells and Farmer Brown know, and I assume Brigade does as well. I have kind of a quirky past, even for a Volunteer. Better you hear it from me than from somebody else. To start off with, I’m an It Takes A Village kid.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” gasped Emily. “I’m sorry, Cody, I didn’t know. You don’t have to…”

  “No, no, it’s not anything I’m ashamed of,” he told her. “I have been told that a lot of children in my position always blame themselves and have feelings of guilt, but that’s stupid. It’s not like it was my fault or anything. I know who to blame, believe me. When I was eight years old and we were living down in Centralia, my Dad was attacked by a nigger and he defended himself.”

  “Oops!” said Emily with a wry face.

  “He defended himself successfully,” continued Cody.

  “Double oops,” said Emily.

  “Yeah. Okay, he was drunk, but he wouldn’t let himself be murdered like a good little honky, so he’s still in Walla Walla. One of the reasons I joined the NVA is so some day I can go in with all my comrades and bust him out, or at least get him out when we win. And then maybe even find my sister, wherever they sent her. I was eight at the time, like I said, and that was young enough so I could bring a pretty high price with the adoption bond, as they called it. Normally I would have been sold to some family of really rich yuppies and would have grown up with the best of everything, which is one of the excuses they keep coming up with when they try and tell people how It Takes A Village isn’t really so bad for us poor little white trash kids who get auctioned off to these upper crud assholes. But in my case I really hit the jackpot, in the sarcastic sense. My bond was taken up by a big Jew lawyer in San Francisco named Larry Sapirstein and his shiksa trophy wife, Gina. Larry had two daughters by his first marriage, his Jew wife, another lawyer named Jennifer who was always hanging around and meddling in the family like some kind of yenta character in a TV sitcom, but there was no son. He wanted a son and so did Gina, but neither wanted to go to all the trouble of having their own. Mess up Gina’s svelte figure, you know.”

  “A liberal, a lawyer, and a Jew?” said Emily. “That’s a real triple threat.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  “Why the hell did a Jewish family want to adopt a Gentile kid?” asked Emily. “Jews are the biggest racists around when it comes to their own form of racial purity.”

  “I know. They even have an old word for it in Ladino, which is one of their little private languages, the Sephardic equivalent of Yiddish. They call it limpezia de sangre, which means purity of blood. That term comes from medieval Spain, when Ferdinand and Isabella finally got tired of their bullshit and gave them the boot. A lot of Jews converted to Catholicism on the surface, but they stayed Jewish in secret and only intermarried among each others’ families, thus maintaining the purity of their Jewish blood. I got to learn all this in yeshiva school, believe or not. They’re quite proud of themselves.”

  “Little blue beanie on your head and all?” she asked.

  “You got it. As well as getting properly circumcised in the shul on Sabbath, by a mohel, who is a rabbi who specializes in cutting pieces of little boys’ dicks off. That was one of the things that Larry specified when he was shopping for a manchild. No hospital circumcisions. Really great thing to happen to a guy when he’s eight years old, eh? Have some bearded freak cut your dick off, or part of it anyway, in public, in front of a minyan of ten other men and the rest of the damned congregation. But to answer your question, as to why the Sapirsteins wanted me specifically? Besides my not being circumcised? Well, for another thing, Gina thought I was cute, kind of like a puppy.”

  “How much is that doggie in the window?”

  “Something like that. As to why Larry wanted me? Pure arrogance. My dad had gone to prison for hatecrime, and Larry got this idea that getting a so-called white supremacist’s kid and turning him into an Orthodox Jew, and of course a good liberal to boot, would be a real ego and power trip. Kind of the ultimate denazification course. Revenge for Auschwitz and all that crap. Put the evil racist in prison for the rest of his life, and turn his son into one of the Chosen Ones, complete with a knitted blue kipa. He always referred to his adopting me as a mitzvah, a righteous act in the religious sense. When I understood that he meant it, that he really thought what had been done to my family was a good thing and pleasing to God, I think that was when I started to understand the terrible evil that is abroad in the world, dressed in clothes like people. So I got to spend my adolescence in the company of Jews, with the result that I intend to spend the rest of my life killing them. You can have no idea what a vileness they are, until you’ve seen them up close like I have. When you have seen them that close, you understand why all down through history, eventually every nation among whom they ever lived has so frantically tried to expel them, to eradicate them.”

  “Oh, crikey!” said Emily. “And I thought I had a case of the
ass for ‘em! Do I even dare ask what your home life was like?”

  Cody sighed. “You mean did they beat me or anything like that? No, no physical abuse, unless you count that godawful bris.” He decided not to mention his stepsisters’ visits to his room in the night for their little private play sessions. That was something Cody had pretty much decided never to mention aloud to anyone, unless he were ever to get the opportunity just before he blew Karen and Leah’s brains out. “We were rich even by Jewish standards. I never lacked for anything material, money or toys or computers. I had my own credit card at age ten. We traveled a lot. I’m probably one of the few Northwest Volunteers who has actually been to Israel, which I mostly remember as gaudy hotels with bad food. Kind of a shabby Miami Beach. There were Jews screaming at one another everywhere. Israel is a kind of open-air madhouse, with a lot of auto accidents on the roadside all the time. And beatings. You always see cops and soldiers beating Arabs, stopping them, throwing them against walls, kicking them down on the sidewalk, that kind of stuff. It’s ironic they call us haters. In Israel there is this poisonous atmosphere of hate and violence and madness that just seems to hang in the air like the dust. You choke on it. It’s what you get when you jam a lot of Jews together in a small space.

  “Okay, I was young, and maybe if the Sapirsteins had played it right I might eventually have forgotten about the fact that they were cannibals who had stolen me through the destruction of my own family. But they just wouldn’t let it go. It was a really weird power trip and Larry and the girls were hooked on it. They couldn’t get enough of humiliating me and my race. A lot of it was what you would expect, of course. I got dragged to the San Francisco Holocaust museum at least once a month the whole time I lived with them. I got to know the ushers and the janitors by their first names. Most of the time Larry tried to be this big all-wise father figure, when he wasn’t devising all kinds of weird little psycho head games to mess with my mind. I was his project in life. I was a kind of toy robot or machine he was building, and he was constantly tinkering. He was just determined he was going to mold me into some kind of corporate Henry Kissinger rabbi super-freak philosopher statesman who would elevate Israel above the nations or something.

  “He used to take me into his study after dinner and sit me down and go into these long monologues about ethics and history and Torah and true humanism and Kabbalah and the Brotherhood of Man and the Symbolic Snake of Judaism and on and on and on. It was the most boring, arrogant, enraging bullshit you have ever heard in your life. Are you familiar with the psychiatric term paranoid schizophrenia? Decayed personality, delusions of persecution, fascination with excrement, so forth and so on? Well, the Jews have made a whole religion out of a mental illness. With that plus what I got in yeshiva I could probably pass as a rabbi and argue Talmud, which I’ve already had passed up to Third Section. I may end up getting sent to New York for Operation Applesmash. It was—God, I don’t know how to describe it. It was just hellish. Sometimes I used to get the idea that Jews aren’t really people, they’re reptiles of some kind. It was like I was living in a crocodile pit or a serpentarium, with things always slithering just out of my line of sight.

  “They just feel different from normal people. The Christian Identity people in the NVA I’ve met tell me they are of Satanic creation. I don’t know about Satan, but I can believe they are made on some kind of different blueprint than white people. God, those so-called ethics sessions of Larry’s! I felt like I was drowning, but I couldn’t just pretend to listen, I had to ask questions and sit at his feet and pretend to absorb it all like a sponge. Knowing I was looking at the man who was benefiting from my father’s agony, the man who had taken me but thrown my sister back in the bargain bin. Gina wasn’t really so bad, she was just completely materialistic and a bubblehead. She liked me and she was nice to me. But Karen and Leah, and that whole crowd I was forced into? Larry might have considered me to be his project, but none of the rest of them were buying it. Oh, no. I always knew that adopted or not, I was not one of them and if things ever went bad they would turn on me in a heartbeat. I was a shaygets and I was never allowed to forget it.”

  “A what?” asked Emily, fascinated.

  “A shaygets. It’s the male version of shiksa. Look, I can’t really tell you what it was like, and we’d better get inside. Pastor Len might get the idea we’re out here canoodling or something.”

  “Wait, what happened?” asked Emily.

  “I found a way to escape, kind of,” said Cody. “You might say it was my first tickle.”

  “Well, tell me! Those bird-brains in there can wait!”

  “I started going to the library a lot, but I couldn’t check out any really subversive books, because I was a kid and the library had a policy of sending the parents a list of all the books their children checked out, so they could make sure their progeny weren’t turning into evil Nazis, or Satanists, or Tridentine Catholics, or falling into some other unapproved thought. When I was thirteen and old enough to check out books from the adult section, I rented a private mail box from a chink who didn’t care how old I was so long as my money was good. I waited until there was a trainee librarian behind the main desk, I applied for a new card, and I listed a phony parent at the mailbox, so then I had two cards. That way I could check out what I really wanted to read. Every week I’d dump my school books in my locker, go to the library, check out some politically correct books on my official card and my own choices for the week on my bootleg card. I’d come home with an armful of things like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, biographies of Martin Luther King, stories about Indians, and of course all kinds of Jew stuff by Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and so on, you get the idea. In my book bag, which they’d think were the school books I’d left in my locker, I had the stuff I really wanted to read, anything I could find about white people and white history.

  “Mostly older stuff, of course. I remember I read once in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius a simple sentence: ‘If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it.’ I contrasted that with all the so-called ethics in the Talmud and yeshiva and Larry’s evening rants, and I knew that was all the moral law I’d ever need. And it didn’t come from any goddamned Jew rabbi with a beard and a kipa. It came from a man of my own race. I suddenly understood that the rest of the human race doesn’t need the Jews to lord it over us and tell us right from wrong. We know, and we know a hell of a lot better than they do. Then when I was sixteen, and something made me know I was ready, I went to a used bookstore where I knew the guy behind the counter, and for a hundred dollars I bought an illegal, under-the-counter copy of Mein Kampf.

  “And that was it. I finished the Führer’s book, went to an ATM and maxed out my cash limit on my card so I’d have some traveling money, then went back to the Sapirsteins’ for the last time. Larry was sitting in the kitchen having a nosh. He said hello or something, and I told him ‘Today I am man,’ which in case your Judaic lore isn’t what it might be, is what I’d said in shul for my bar mitzva. It was time, time for me to be a man. I went to the drawer and pulled out a carving knife, walked up to him and said ‘Jared Brock says hello, Jewboy,’ and stabbed him in the gut. He ran through the house screaming in Yiddish, with the knife sticking out of his belly. I walked out, I got away, and after many perilous and swashbuckling adventures, here I am about to go in there with you and tell those yeggs in there all about how I’ve been washed in the blood. So I have. Just not the blood they mean.”

  Emily giggled. “You know you’re not supposed to say anything when you hit,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, I know. The no conversation rule. Bells explained that to me. I think that was why Larry was able to react a bit and dodge my thrust, because I took time to run my mouth and warn him. If I’d kept quiet and just done what I had to do, I might have made my bones two years ago instead of the other night.”

  “That was your first?” she asked.

  “Yep,” he admitted. There was no point in
denying it, since she was hanging with Bobby’s crew now and she could find out.

  “You did very well,” she complimented him.

  “Well, thank yuh, ma’am!” he said in a bad John Wayne imitation. “Now I think we need to get in there and start getting filled with the Spirit.”

  She got out of the car, then leaned back in. “And to save you asking, no, I haven’t actually done the deed yet, just set a few of ‘em up like that night.”

  “Does it bother you?” he asked her.

  She stopped smiling. “One day I’ll tell you my story. Then you won’t have to ask.”

  III.

  “In my capacity as commander in chief of the armed forces, effective immediately, I hereby direct all United States military units and law enforcement agencies in the Pacific Northwest to halt operations

  and observe a full ceasefire.” - President Chelsea Clinton

  The air conditioner was on again in the upper room of Mrs. Sweetzer’s shambling boarding house, and this time it was needed. This July was turning out to be a genuinely hot month in Seattle, in every sense of the word.

  The men who were meeting there today were the Political Bureau’s working committee in charge of assembling and briefing the rebel delegation to the Longview conference. The living room of the small, cheap furnished apartment was crowded, with several of the participants seated on the formica kitchen table which had been moved in. In addition to Frank Barrow, Jeff Anderson, Pat Brennan, Red Morehouse, Joe Dortmunder and Corby Morgan there was Colonel Carter Wingfield from the newly formed Special Service, Colonel Daniel “Dangerous Dan” McGrew who had taken over the Third Section from the late Matt Redmond, as well as Fred Schuster and Andrei Stavrovich Stepanov of the Political Bureau itself. “Okay, comrades, first order of business,” said Jeff Anderson. “We’ve gotten a list of who the ZOG delegation to the conference will be. I have to admit, they’ve put together a high-powered team. The chair of the American delegates will be Walter Stanhope, the Secretary of State, just like we’d heard. Sitting at his right hand and looking over his shoulder will be the Secretary of Homeland Security, Howard Weintraub, who will presumably be there as the official Jewish evil eminence.”