“And you will enact your plan, how?” asked Schteir. “With the guns and knives you-and others like you-have amassed in basements and attics?”
“We will do what we have to do,” said Karff. “Heed my warning. The war is coming.” He looked over at Archer and said, “RAHOWA!”
“Ah, yes,” said Schteir, affecting ennui. “RaHoWa. Ra for Racial, Ho for Holy, Wa for War. Your group’s battle cry. You know…it sounds very much like the language used by a tribe in Papua, New Guinea. Fascinating people. I wonder if that’s where it comes from.”
“You think you’re so smart, like all of your kind.” Karff’s eyes had narrowed. “We’ll see how smart you are when the war comes, you Jew bitch-”
Archer grabbed hold of Karff’s arm. “Watch your mouth.”
Karff eyed Archer’s dark hand on his pale white flesh.
Schteir allowed the agent to do a little damage-Karff would be bruised by morning-then she laid her hand gently over Archer’s, and said, “I think that’s enough-for now.”
Archer gave the man’s arm another good squeeze before he let go.
“So, Mr. Karff, let’s get back to the present war, the small, sad little war you and your fellow World Church members are fighting, the one where you kill off one person at a time.” She slid crime scene pictures of the victims onto the table.
“Who are these mud people and race traitors supposed to be?”
“Come now, Mr. Karff, you can do better than that,” said Schteir.
“I have no idea what you want me to say.”
“Say whatever you want to say, Mr. Karff. After all, this is a free country, a country that allows you to espouse your religious and racial views without threat of punishment. So speak your mind. Go on. Tell me what you think of me, of Agent Archer here, of the people you refer to as the mud people and race traitors.” She slapped her hand down hard onto the photos and Karff flinched.
Terri snatched the photos up and one by one raised them to his face.
“These are people,” she said. “Do you even get that concept? I realize it might be difficult for an emotional cripple like you, but try.”
Karff stared straight ahead, freezing his expression.
Was this the face I had been trying to see? I wasn’t sure. There was something generic about it, the kind of man you might pass in the street without noticing.
Terri dropped the photos and planted her face into Karff’s, nostrils flared, eyes narrowed. “Your weapons have been confiscated, Carl. So what are you now, huh? Just a sad little man with Nazi tattoos that make you feel tough.” She laid her fingers onto one of his blue-inked swastikas. “You’re being watched, Carl, like the song says: “…every move you make.”’
Karff continued to stare, but his lids were flickering; she was getting to him.
“We’re seeing it. All of it, Carl. My friends here at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, hell, they’re just itching to publicize your anti-American activities. Not a popular subject these days, and getting less popular by the minute. We’re going to take you down, Carl. Way fucking down.”
I’d never seen Terri like this, and believed she could take him down.
The veins in Karff’s neck were standing out in high relief as he strained his head back like a turtle’s.
Schteir put her hand on Terri’s shoulder. I wasn’t sure it was the right move, but maybe she just wanted to run the show.
“What?” Terri barked.
“I think it’s time we showed Mr. Karff the photos we have of his late-night drives.” She maneuvered herself in front of Terri, who backed up and took a few deep breaths to regain her composure.
Schteir spread a new set of photos across the table. I couldn’t see them, but Karff could, his eyes twitching, frontalis muscles wrinkling his forehead, mentalis muscles quivering his chin. “Here we have you leaving your Queens home and getting into your station wagon at eleven-fourteen P.M.,” said Schteir. “You can see how the digital camera notes the time and date in the lower corner. Terrific invention, the digital camera, don’t you think? Not to mention the zoom lens.”
“I see the date,” said Karff. “And I also see these are six months old.”
“We have similar ones from one week earlier, and then a week or so before that. I suppose the photographer got bored taking the same pictures over and over.” She laid another photo in front of him. “Let’s see where your car ends up, shall we? Ah, here it is, on the other side of the river, in Manhattan, at eleven forty-seven P.M., on West Fourteenth and Greenwich Street. I wonder what you were doing there at close to midnight?”
She slid another picture out of the stack. “Here you are, on the corner, and there’s a really tall woman leaning into your driver’s-side window. A black woman. I’ve misjudged you, Mr. Karff, thinking you were a racist. It just goes to show you how wrong snap judgments can be.” Schteir peered at the photo. “No, wait a minute-that’s no woman!” She handed the picture to Terri.
“Oh, Carl, what a bad boy you are.” She snickered. “Would you look at that, Agent Archer.” Terri waved the photo. “Carl here gets off on she-males.”
Karff had turned pale.
“And what is happening here at eleven fifty-two P.M.?” Schteir had already turned to another photo. “It appears as if that same tall woman-excuse me, that tall black man dressed as a woman-has gotten into your car, and the two of you are…oh, my, look at this.” She raised the photo for Archer and Terri to see.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Terri. “Let’s put these pictures on Carl’s personal website-or even better, the World Church’s website. What do you think?”
“Great idea,” said Schteir, smiling.
“Those pictures are a fake,” said Karff.
“Well…Let’s just see what others make of them, shall we?” said Schteir.
“For starters,” said Terri. “How about…Carl’s wife?”
“You can’t do that.”
“Mr. Karff,” said Schteir. “I am the FBI. And I can do whatever I want.”
Karff’s lower lip was trembling. “I told you I don’t know those people.”
“Well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t,” said Schteir. “As we speak, our lab technicians are checking your weapons and we will soon know for sure whether or not they have been fired recently. If the bullets match, we will know if you knew these people. In the meantime, I’ll tell you what I want. I want names. Names and addresses of everyone who is connected to your church in this geographic section of the world. I want to know who you talk to and who talks to you. I want to know who has come to you for guidance, orders, repentance, or whatever the hell else you people talk about. You understand, Mr. Karff? I hope so, because I am one tough Jewish bitch who would like nothing better than to put your pathetic white ass in an Attica cell with murderers and rapists and let them know that you refer to them as mud people.”
Karff’s face hardened again, features pulled toward the center and tensed. “My Aryan brothers will protect me.”
I knew he was referring to the Aryan Brotherhood, The Brand, as they liked to call themselves, which had started back in the sixties in San Quentin, a way for the whites prisoners to protect themselves against the blacks and Latinos.
“Oh, I think we can find a place where the Aryan Brotherhood is outnumbered,” said Terri.
Schteir nodded. “So, what do think, Mr. Karff? It’s either you or someone you know who is responsible for these killings. And even if it isn’t you, we’re going to hold you-which we can do for a very long time-if even one of the forty-six guns recovered from your home is not licensed. And that’s just for starters. So, any of this getting through to you?” She turned to Archer. “I’d like a set of close-ups of this African American gentleman in the wig and hot pants and his statement as well. It’s in the large file on Mr. Karff. I believe the gentleman goes by the name of Veronique, who, by the way, Mr. Karff, will testify that you are the man in the Ford station wagon that she, excuse me-he-has been servicing for quite some time now.”