Funny, thought Lieutenant Otto Waterhouse of the State's Attorney's Police. Every time things get hairy, that damn song starts going through my head. I must be an obsessive-compulsive neurotic. He'd first heard the song, "To Be a Man" by Len Chandler, at the home of a chick he was balling back in '65. It expressed pretty well for him his condition as a member of the tribe. The tribe, that was how he thought of black people; he'd heard a Jew refer to the Jews that way, and he liked it better than that soul brother shit. Deep down, he hated other blacks and he hated being black. You had to climb, that was the thing. You had to climb, each man alone.
When Otto Waterhouse was eight years old, a gang of black kids on the South Side had beaten him, knifed him and thrown him into Lake Michigan to drown. Otto didn't know how to swim, but somehow he'd pulled himself along the concrete pilings, clinging to rusty steel where there was nothing to cling to, his blood seeping out into the water, and he'd stayed there, hidden, till the gang went away. Then he pulled himself along to a ladder, climbed up and dragged himself onto the concrete pier. He lay there, almost dead, wondering if the gang would come back and finish him.
Someone did come along. A cop. The cop nudged Otto's body with his toe, rolled it over and looked down. Otto looked up at the Irish face, round, pig-nosed and blue-eyed.
"Oh, shit," said the cop, and walked on.
Somehow Otto lived till morning, when a woman came along and found him and called an ambulance. Years later, it seemed logical enough to him to join the police force. He knew the members of the gang that nearly killed him. He didn't bother with them until after he got on the force. Then he found cause to kill each of the gang members- several of whom had by then become respectable citizens- one by one. Most of them didn't know who he was or why he was killing them. The number he killed made his reputation in the Chicago Police Department. He was a nigger cop who could be trusted to deal with niggers.
Otto never did know who the cop was who'd left him to die- he remembered the face, more or less, but they all looked alike to him.
He had another oddly vivid memory, of a fall day in 1970 when he'd been walking through Pioneer Court and had hassled a dude who was giving out free samples of- of all things- tomato juice. Otto took a ten from the dude and drank some tomato juice. The guy had a crew haircut and wore horn-rimmed glasses. He didn't seem to mind having to pay a bribe, and he looked at Otto with an odd gleam in his eye as the tomato juice went down. For a moment, Otto thought the tomato juice might be poisoned. There were cop haters everywhere; many people seemed to have sworn to kill the "pigs" as they called them. But dozens of people had already drunk the juice and gone away happy. Otto shrugged and walked off.
Thinking back over the strange changes that had come over him, Otto always traced them back to that moment. There had been something in the juice.
It wasn't till Stella Maris told him about AUM that he realized how he'd been had. And by then it was too late. He was a three-way loser, working for the Syndicate, the Illuminati and Discordian Movement. The only way out was down- down into the chaos with Stella pointing the way.
"Just tell me one thing, baby," he said to her one afternoon as they lay naked together in his apartment in Hyde Park. "Why did they pick you to contact me?"
"Because you hate niggers," said Stella calmly, running her finger down his dick. "You hate niggers worse than any white man does. That's why the way to freedom for you lies through me."
"And what about you?" he said angrily, pulling away from her and sitting up in bed. "I suppose you can't tell the difference between black and white. Black meat and white meat, it's all the same to you, ain't it, you goddamned whore!"
"You'd like to think so," said Stella. "You'd like to think only a nigger whore would lay you, a whore who'd lay anybody regardless of race. But you know you are wrong. You know that Otto Waterhouse, the black man who is better than all black men because he hates all black men, is a lie. It's you who can't tell the difference between black and white and thinks the black man should be where the white man is and hates the black man because he isn't white. No, I see color. But I see everything else about a person, too, baby. And I know that nobody is where they should be and everybody should be where they are."
"Oh, fuck your goddam philosophy," said Water-house. "Come here."
But he learned. He thought he'd learned everything Stella and Hagbard and the rest of them had to teach him. And that was a lot, piled on top of all that Illuminati garbage. But now they'd thrown him a total curve.
He was to kill.
The message came, as all the messages did, from Stella.
"Hagbard said to do this?"
"Yes."
"And I suppose, if I go along with this, I''ll be told why later on, or I'll figure it out for myself? Goddam, Stella, this is asking a lot, you know."
"I know. Hagbard told me you have to do this for two reasons. First, for the honor of the Discordians, so that they will have respect."
"He sounds like a wop for once. But he's right. I understand that."
"Second. He said because Otto Waterhouse must kill a white man."
"What?" Otto started to tremble in the phone booth. He picked nervously, without reading it, at a sticker that said, THIS PHONE BOOTH RESERVED FOR CLARK KENT.
"Otto Waterhouse must kill a white man. He said you'd know what that meant."
Otto's hand was still shaking when he hung up. "Oh, damn," he said. He was almost crying.
So now on April 28 he stood at a green metal door marked "1723." It was the service entrance to a condominium apartment at 2323 Lake Shore Drive. Behind him stood a dozen State's Attorney's police. All of them, like himself, were wearing body armor and baby-blue helmets with transparent plastic visors. Two were carrying submachine guns.
"All right," said Waterhouse, glancing at his watch. It had amused Flanagan to set the time for the raid at 5:23 A.M. It was 5:22:30. "Remember- shoot everything that moves." He kept his back to the men so they would not see the damned tears that Insisted on welling up in his eyes.
"Right on, lieutenant," said Sergeant O'Banion satirically. Sergeant O'Banion hated blacks, but worse than that he hated filthy, lice-ridden, long-haired, homosexual, Communist-inspired Morituri bomb manufacturers. He believed that there was a whole disgusting nest of them, sleeping together, dirty naked bodies entwined, like a can full of worms, just on the other side of that green metal door. He could see them. He licked his lips. He was going to clean them out. He hefted the machine gun.
"Okay," said Waterhouse. It was 5:23. Shielding himself with one gloved hand, he pointed his.45 at the lock on the door. The instructions given orally by Flanagan at the briefing were that they would not show a warrant or even knock before entering. The apartment was said to be full of enough dynamite to wipe out the entire block of luxury high-rise apartment houses. Presumably the kids, if they knew they were caught, would set them off. That way they could take a bunch of pigs with them, preserve their reputation for suicidal bravery, protect themselves from giving away any information, use the explosives and avoid having to live with the shaming knowledge that they'd been dumb enough to get caught.
O'Banion was imagining finding a white girl in the arms of a black boy and finishing them off with one burst from his machine gun. His cock swelled in his pants.
Waterhouse fired.
In the next instant he threw his weight against the door and smashed it open. He was in a hallway next to the kitchen. He walked into the apartment. His shoes rang on a bare tile floor. Tears ran down his cheeks.
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he sobbed.
"Who's that?" a voice called. Waterhouse, whose eyes had adjusted to the darkness, looked across the empty living room into the foyer, where Milo A. Flanagan stood silhouetted in the light from the exterior hall.