“What does TechChildren do?”

“Yes, well, TechChildren is an EFT subsidiary involved in developing educational software for kids. Our plans include developing software to help kids learn quicker and easier. Classrooms will look a whole lot different in the future. The blackboard and paper textbook days are coming to an end.”

“Have you ever heard of a company called EduSoft?”

Hurley began looking around the room, stalling, searching for the answer. “Yes,” he said, his smile forced now. “EduSoft is an educational software consultant.”

“Do EFT and TechChildren do business with EduSoft?”

“That’s a good question. I don’t know.”

“Have you ever heard of an organization called The Eleven?”

Hurley’s face crimsoned, but the smile remained, like somebody who has just accidentally walked into a post in front of a crowd and wants them to believe he meant to do it.

“I don’t believe this,” Sam said to Ott, watching his dreams unravel in the bar. “I don’t freakin’ believe this.”

“No, I can’t say that I have,” Hurley said. “Is it a computer company?”

“No,” said Bo. “The Eleven is a white supremacist group. Are you sure you’ve never heard of them?”

“No,” said Hurley, his voice rising. “What does this have to do with EFT and computers for kids? What are you suggesting?”

The camera switched to Bo, who stared down Hurley with calm contempt, hungry for the kill. “I’m suggesting, Mr. Hurley, that EFT is a front organization for a white supremacist group; that state, federal, and charitable funds have been used improperly to support this group; and that you, sir, are a white supremacist.”

Hurley leered back at Bo. “That’s an outrageous accusation, Mr. Wolfson, and you are doing tremendous harm to the children of central Pennsylvania by making it.”

“I have a videotape I’d like to show you, Mr. Hurley, and then I’d like to give you a chance to comment on it.”

A small television monitor is arranged on Mr. Hurley’s desk. A dimly lit videotape with a muffled sound track, as if the camera were hidden inside a bag, shows Holden Hurley in front of a roomful of white men, pacing back and forth in front of a Nazi flag.

“My Aryan brothers,” Mr. Hurley says, “today is a great day! Today we are ready to begin to Educate-for-Tomorrow the white youth of today on how we will win the coming race war, and we’re going to do it by using EFT’s computer intranet, built with the kikes’ and niggers’ own money, right under their own crooked and flat noses! And it all begins with this man, my brothers-our very special Aryan brother from the Arab world, Samar Mansour, who with our help, has just finished a documentary proving that the Holocaust was nothing but a Jew lie.”

Ott looked at Sam in the bar, watching with his mouth open.

On the screen, Sam stands up to accept the applause of the members of The Eleven and thank them for their support. “It is time,” he says, “for Arabs and Aryans to join forces against their common enemy. This documentary is the first step in what I hope will be a long and successful collaboration. My contribution to the battle will not be another suicide bombing like my brave Palestinian brothers, who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for the cause. No, I intend to demolish not just a few bricks of the State of Israel but the very foundation upon which the State of Israel was built. No gas chambers, no Israel!”

The room erupted into applause.

Trudy, the bartender, looked from the television to Sam and back.

“It’s all over,” Sam said to Ott. “They’re probably out looking for me right now. I’ve gotta go.” He left twenty dollars on the table and walked out with Trudy looking after him.

Ott turned back to the television to see Holden Hurley’s face twisted into a shape as ugly as the Swastika behind him on the small monitor in his office. He said to Bo: “Sometimes people got to stand up for what’s right and fix what’s wrong. One day you’ll understand that I’ve been doing both and you’ll make me a goddamned hero. Now get the hell out of my office.”

38

How bizarre it is for me to see life through a man’s eyes, through my murderer’s eyes.

How bizarre to experience his moods and obsessions, his sorrows and joys. How bizarre to see a baby and not ache to hold her but to see a beautiful woman and crave her with every nerve; how bizarre to flex muscles rather than stick out my chest, to talk tough with my buddies rather than share vulnerabilities with my girlfriends, to towel dry my hair and walk out rather than style my hair and apply makeup. How bizarre to be Ott Bowles as he shoots a bullet into the seat next to Sarah, and to hear me screaming; to feel the intense, almost sexual gratification of exercising complete dominance and control over me and seeing the terror in my eyes. How bizarre to see the small movements of my head as I drive down the road, to feel the softness of my body through the gun in the back seat, to feel contempt for me and everything I stand for but, at the same time, to be physically attracted to me and imagine what it would be like to make love to me, to listen to me pleading for my daughter’s life and my own and, for an instant, to feel sympathy for me and to question whether I should have kidnapped a mother and her daughter and to search for a way out. How bizarre to feel the pain of a knee being driven into my groin. How bizarre to count down the last days of life on death row, to come to peace with death, to contemplate and confront its presence, and then to be delivered into it, strapped into a chair and electrocuted. And, in the end, how incredibly insignificant Sarah and I were inside Otto Bowles’ life, how little we really mattered. We represented an unseen enemy, Sarah and I, the way words represent an unseen thought; and because this enemy could not be seen, we became the enemy, just as words are sometimes mistaken for the ideas they represent. To Ott Bowles, Sarah and I were primarily symbols, not human beings, a means to an end, nothing more than that.

And so, gazing back through my murderer’s eyes, I could appreciate the logic of a kidnapping, because through those eyes I could see how all hope for the Rabuns of Kamenz vanished when my husband aired his tape of Holden Hurley and Samar Mansour carving their initials into the tree of history with the crooked iron spikes of a Swastika. Which was odd, actually, because those days had been so different, so magical and glorious for us. The story was picked up by the national network, and we threw a party to celebrate the launching of Bo’s career. We never considered the impact of the story on Hurley, Mansour, or the other members of The Eleven, because they represented our unseen enemy: the bully around the corner, the false prophet behind the pulpit, the subversive thought rotting the fabric of society. Like a little David, my Bo had slain the beast, and we were proud. We had no idea that at the same time we were celebrating this great victory, Samar Mansour was sealing a videocassette copy of his documentary into a padded mailing envelope with the following note:

Ott,

The truth is what we want it to be.

We may never see each other again.

Plant the seeds.

Your friend,

Sam

By Sunday morning, the FBI had arrested Hurley on multiple counts of mail and wire fraud, tax evasion, and racketeering. A nationwide manhunt for Samar Mansour ended with confirmation that he’d fled the country, probably to Yemen or Afghanistan. Ott received the videocassette in Buffalo and inserted it into the tape player in his bedroom after his mother had gone to sleep.

Sam Mansour’s documentary is actually a well-constructed and well-produced film, beginning with a grim river of historic black and white photographs appearing and disappearing on the screen: men in Nazi uniforms, the frightened faces of women and children being loaded onto train cars, electrified fences around concentration camps, prison barracks, showers, mounds of decaying corpses, smokestacks, incinerators. The images flash by faster and faster, finally trailing off to a screen of black. From this darkness, the mournful cry of an oboe emerges; it is the first sound we hear on the documentary, and it plays a dirge to accompany the slow march across the screen of hundreds of titles of books and films about the Holocaust-every title Sam Mansour could find during his research. As the last of these scroll across the screen, the oboe is swallowed by the symphonic roar of Wagner’s Die Walküre, and the sneering face of Adolph Hitler consumes the screen. Finally, the title of the documentary appears in white letters superimposed over an aerial shot of Auschwitz, swooping down onto the reddish vein of rusting train tracks leading into the camp and the platform where millions of feet beat their last steps: What Happened? Sam Mansour stands on this platform as the camera zooms in; he is wearing the same black pants and blue shirt he had been wearing at Trudy’s, the color of the shirt matching his eyes. His thick, dark hair is carefully combed, and he is waiting for us, the audience, to join him. His voice suits the role, educated, evocative, authoritative, believable; ironically, he looks and sounds more like a rabbi than a Palestinian doctoral student attempting to disprove the Holocaust, which only adds to his credibility. Smiling, he introduces himself as Sam Mansour, furthering the friendly academic impression, and he asks the audience a very serious question: What Happened? He talks to the camera as he walks toward the showers, explaining the purpose of the film and assuring us that he has no agenda other than the truth. As his proofs unfold, he asks us to leap with him the many gaps in logic and evidence that must be leaped, but keeps coming back to the “truth,” always the truth, insisting on it, demanding that we believe he is acting in our best interest.