It was half past lunchtime when we got to my place. By the time I had my front door unlocked, both of the Gordell sisters were both on the front porch.
"Rennie?" said Mrs. Atlee. "This is an odd hour. Is everything all right?"
Before I could answer, Ernst Vielstich rounded the high hedge and started the deliberate climb up the two front steps. His eyes flicked up from watching his footing, and he saw the Gordell sisters just as they saw him.
Ernst tipped his head with a nod of acknowledgment that was both impeccably polite and absolutely debonair.
"Ladies," he said, and turned his eyes to me. "Your charming neighbors, Miss Avalon?"
I nodded. "The Gordell sisters, Janice and Nell." Somehow, I guessed that they'd be happier being introduced without their married names. "Ladies, this is Mr. Ernst Vielstich, a client of mine."
Ernst reached the top step and set his overnight bag down before taking each woman by the hand in a chivalrous clasp that turned their wrists up, as if he meant to kiss them. Which he might as well have done. Janice Atlee's mouth turned up in a delighted little grin, and I swear that Nell Burkett's lined cheeks colored almost imperceptibly.
"Mr. Vielstich," said Mrs. Atlee, "you're one of Rennie's clients?"
"Yes. My apartment has unfortunately been rendered temporarily unliveable by some unsavory elements, and Miss Avalon was kind enough to offer – insist, really – that I stay here tonight. And please, call me Ernst."
I went inside to find something for lunch while Ernst continued to exude sincere and natural charm on my front porch. My cell phone rang.
It was Philip Castler.
"Where are you?" I asked.
"At a pay phone," he said. "Outside a Seven-Eleven right across from Centennial Park."
"Stay there. I'll come meet you."
I popped back out onto the porch.
"Ernst," I said, "that was Philip Castler. I need to go talk to him. I was just about to start some lunch, but --"
"Oh, that's all right, Rennie," said Janice. "We were just starting to prepare our own. Mr. Vi-- Ernst, would you like to join us?"
He smiled. "Under the circumstances, I can only assume that I would be imposing."
"Don't worry," I said. "I'm their landlord."
** ** **
Philip Castler was waiting not far from a bus stop on the edge of Centennial Park. The grass was still green, salted here and there with the first leaves to fall from the trees. A couple of homeless hitchhikers were lounging with their backs to the trees farther from the street, napping with one eye open for the automatic sprinklers.
He walked a few steps closer to acknowledge my arrival, and stood fidgeting. I met him wordlessly on the grass and we started walking slowly and without direction. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets. Between his turned-up collar and his full black beard I could see the livid marks where Hans Mueller's fingers had dug mercilessly into his flesh less than two hours before.
"My wife's going to meet the kids as they get out of school," he said. "They're going from there to her sister's place."
"What did you tell her?"
"I just said there was trouble with Hans. She filled in the blanks. She never did like him."
He was wound tight, his thoughts running on mousewheels caged inside him.
I sat on a park bench and watched him. He kicked at some of the leaves on the grass, then sat on the other end of the bench, his elbows propped on his knees, staring at the scuffed and beaten earth under his shoes.
"We weren't..."
He stopped, hunted for other words, rolled them around in his mouth, and began again.
"There are racists, and there are racists. That probably sounds strange to you. I've seen these kids running around, these neo-Nazi gangs. There are some of them here in the city, you know. They're exactly like the Latino gangs and the Black gangs and the Asian gangs. Just a bunch of punk kids looking for an excuse to beat somebody up for fun and sell some drugs, plus they get some shock value out of the swastika tattoos. And StormFront always got lumped in with them. Just another 'hate group,' as far as most people were concerned. Like we were all focused on nothing but hate. We aren't."
He rubbed his hands on the knees of his jeans.
"You know, we don't have a member of StormFront who's under twenty-seven. A few of us do have tattoos, from time in the military. We aren't obsessed with hate, dedicated to it. Really, we aren't. We just see... problems around us.
"Look at history. Every stable country, ever, has had a single culture, a single racial identity. Even today, most nationalities are defined by a single culture. The French. The Japanese. The Swedes. Pick any one you like. And it's only when countries start bringing other groups inside, not to assimilate but to remain separate within the borders... that's when things break down. The Roman Empire, the British Empire, all of them. They all lost the identity that made them who they were. They said, 'We can be Many, and still be One,' and not a one of them is still around."
All this time, he had been looking at the ground, as if engaging me head-on would throw off his train of thought. Now, he looked up at me. His eyes weren't defiant or belligerent or self-righteous; he seemed to be searching my face for some sign of understanding or acknowledgment that he wasn't a monster.
"All of us in StormFront remembered the postwar America we grew up in, when the country regrouped and declared a national character. We had an identity, to the rest of the world, and to ourselves. America was a fantastic place where immigrants from a bunch of European countries had come together and taken the best parts of their roots and made something new that was better than all of them. They were Americans. Not English-Americans, or German-Americans, or Dutch-Americans. They came to America and became Americans.
"And then, somewhere along the way, that became bad. Becoming American was a terrible thing, they told us. We shouldn't have to become American to be Americans, they told us. Go ahead and put your allegiance to your old culture above your new homeland. Hell, with Blacks, they became 'African-Americans' even though they didn't have an African culture they remembered. They went and found one, or made one up.
"All these different cultures, all these competing Americas. And they told us that somehow it would make a better and stronger America. That being divided was a new kind of unity.
"They told us that. And StormFront was put together by a bunch of us who just couldn't swallow what they told us."
Philip Castler didn't look like a monster or a hatemonger. He looked like a sincere man who desperately wanted to find the America he knew should be out there – or, if he couldn't find it, to build it.
And then I remembered the framed portrait of Hitler hanging over the TV set in his family room, bathed in the warm lighting that people usually reserve for paintings of Jesus.
"Tell me about Hans," I said. "And the book."
