Hush Money

“I’m Margaret Dryer,” she said. “I’m the dean of student affairs here. Like many of you present I do not agree with Mr. Quant’s view of the human condition.”

The audience quieted a little as she spoke.

“But I agree with his right to hold those ideas and indeed to espouse them, however repellent I personally find them to be. That is the meaning of free speech, and I hope each and every one of you in the audience will respect Mr. Quant’s right to free speech. There has been talk of disruption. I have heard it, just as you have heard it. The police are here. We have asked them to be here. We have asked them to protect everyone’s right to civil discourse. We have also asked them to prevent any infringement on those rights, and they will do so.”

She paused for a moment. The audience was quiet. Then she turned and gestured toward the wings of the stage.

“May I introduce our guest, Mr. Milo Quant, of Last Stand Systems, Incorporated.”

The audience booed the minute his name was mentioned. The booing magnified when he strolled out from the side and replaced Dean Dryer at the lectern. He stood silently for a time, smiling down at the audience, allowing the roar of boos to roll over him. He was a short fat man in a well-made blue suit, a white shirt, and a maroon silk tie. It was hard to be sure from where I sat, but his shoes looked as if they had lifts in them. His nose was sharp and curled a little at the tip like the beak of a falcon. His mouth was wide with thick lips. His face was fleshy. He had thick eyebrows that V-ed down over the bridge of his nose. His upturned smile was V-shaped so that he looked sort of like a devilish Santa Claus. The boos continued. He stood quietly smiling. After a while the students tired. The boos dwindled. Finally it was nearly quiet.

“There,” Quant said. “Feel better?”

There was some more booing, but there was also a scatter of laughter. Quant beamed down at us.

“There, I’m not such a monster now am I? Look a little like your grandfather, maybe.”

Somebody laughed. Somebody yelled “Fascist.”

“Do you know where the word fascist comes from?” Quant said.

He leaned slightly forward at the lectern, so that his mouth was closer to the microphone. He let his folded hands rest quietly on top of the lectern.

“It comes from ancient Rome. It derives from the word fasces which refers to the symbol of Official Power, a bundle of reeds with an axe head protruding. We at Last Stand are hardly fascists. We don’t symbolize official power. We oppose it. We oppose a government hell-bent to dissemble my country, your country, our country. We oppose a government which will make us not Americans, but mongrelized members of a world government where every Arab despot and ca

He was good. The audience was listening.

“And we ask you to join us in that opposition. We are not asking of you the sacrifices that were asked of the men who founded this country.”

“And women,” someone shouted.

Quant smiled.

“They made their own sacrifices. But I’m talking about the men who were asked to fight and often die for liberty. We don’t ask that of you. We ask only that you keep yourself worthy of the liberty they died for. We ask that you keep yourself clean and straight. We ask that you value marriage. That you respect the God of our fathers. That you honor your ethnic purity. That you fulfill the destiny for which so many of those men suffered and died.”

He paused. They listened. He smiled warmly at us all.

“If this be treason,” he said slowly, “let us make the most of it.”

Some people clapped. A few hooted. Most were quiet. Quant went on. If he spoke ill of other races and religions, if he said that all American values were to be found only in white Christian males, he said it obliquely, sliding it in always in terms of honor and cleanliness, heritage, straightness, and respect.

He spoke until 8:15, and then took questions. The majority of the questions were hostile. He handled them easily. He had heard them before. He never said nigger, or queer, or Jew, or dyke. He managed also to be more magnanimous than his questioner, and he always had a gracious and convincing answer for even the most difficult questions.

His answers were largely bullshit, but they were good bullshit. I had years ago learned that it was useless to debate zealots. They had spent most of their adult life thinking intensely about the object of their zealotry. Normally their debaters had not. I wanted to stand and ask him if in fact he were wearing lifts in his shoes. But I was there to watch and listen and I didn’t want to get into it with Horn Rims or any of the other preservers of our heritage. So I shut up. Which is a ploy that often works well for me.

When it was over, Quant was escorted out by his keepers and the cops. It was raining. A small group of students were standing across the street, getting wet, chanting “Two, four, six, eight, USA can’t use your hate.” I wondered why protesters so often demeaned their deepest-held convictions by reciting them loudly in doggerel. Nobody in Quant’s party paid any attention to them. And, in fact, neither did many people in Quant’s audience. Shielded by an umbrella one of the security guys deployed, Quant got into his black Lincoln and departed with three bodyguards. The other security guys got into a large van. The protesters chanted at them until they were out of sight. Then they stood somewhat aimlessly for a few moments and then drifted away in various directions.

I suspected that Quant hadn’t convinced anyone who hadn’t come convinced. But he had made them see that he was pleasant, and that he spoke as if what he espoused was both reasonable and kind, and they were puzzled. And maybe they didn’t enjoy doggerel much, either.

My car had a parking ticket on the windshield issued by the Fitchburg State College Campus Police. I took it off my windshield and tucked it carefully under the wiper of the car next to me. Then I got in and drifted along behind Quant with the windshield wipers making long steady sweeps across my glass, their sound like the rhythm of music that wasn’t playing.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

At about 10:30 with the rain coming down steadily, the Quant limo pulled off of Route 495 near Chelmsford and into the parking lot of a big motel that looked like the Disney version of a Norman castle. The van kept on going. I followed Quant, and got into a slot in the next row and watched as Milo and his bodyguard deployed umbrellas and walked across the glistening parking lot into the hotel lobby. The place was more hotel than motel, in that it was four stories high and entry was through the front door. For my purposes, I would have liked the conventional one-room one-door approach, but the more I live the more I don’t always get what I want. I sat for a while and thought. While I was doing this Hawk opened the passenger door and slid in, the rain beaded on his smooth head.

“Ah ha!” I said.

“Ah ha indeed, my good man,” Hawk said. “The game’s afoot.”

“Amir,” I said.

“Yowzah,” Hawk said. “Rents a car this afternoon, comes out here ‘bout three o’clock. I see him pull in and I take a chance and get into the lobby ’fore he do. There a phone booth right by the desk. I’m in it with my back turned and the phone at my ear when he gets to the desk. He’s got a reservation. He’s in room four seventeen.”

“Good to know,” I said.

“Well, I got nothing much else to do so I hang around, sit in the bar, read a paper, drink some Perrier with a nice wedge of lime, have a club sandwich, drink some more Perrier and about five minutes ago in come a group of people and one of them is our man with the horn-rimmed glasses. They got reservations. Their rooms are four fifteen and four nineteen.”