Chapter 68

It was after two in the morning by the time the buses carrying Lev, Rifkeh, and nearly two hundred people that were at least theoretically no more than two or three degrees away from knowing Rifkeh personally arrived in Miller’s Cataract.

The three buses sat on the shoulder of a county road cresting a rise that overlooked Hodgeman-Lindburgh Park. Their vantage point was high enough to see about a quarter of the park, but at this hour, it was mostly a field of undifferentiated darkness broken by circles of light. Lev could only see the protesters as an elongated arc of flickering flames moving in a slow circle around the visitor center.

“They’re still fucking chanting,” muttered Dawn Wu, an NYU student and ROTC member who’d joined them in the city. When Lev and Rifkeh had realized just how many people were joining them for this trip, they’d scrambled to find volunteers within the group with experience organizing rallies and then any kind of leadership experience at all. When Dawn explained her background and that she was a commissioned officer in training, Lev had joked that she was the closest thing they had to a general. It didn’t seem like such a joke now.

Along with Lev, Rivkeh, and Dawn, the “leadership team” included Professor Joel Abramczyk from the history department at Baruch, a conflict de-escalation specialist, and four off-duty members of the Loft’s security detail.

Lev listened and realized she was right. Beneath the sounds of the night insects and the occasional passing car, voices raised in collective anger repeated a couple of short phrases over and over. He imagined repeating anything the hundreds of times it would take to mark the passing of hours, the kind of fanaticism required to join such a chant, and the hypnotic state it must create with repetition. The five short sharp words “you will not replace us” would stop meaning what they meant and become something even darker than what they implied at the start.

“How do we want to handle this?” Rifkeh asked.

Lev’s original plan had been to drive to the park and add their numbers to the counterprotest outside the front gate. Rabbi Shmuel’s son Josh and a small group stood in the largest, brightest field of light Lev could see. Police had brought a pair of Klieg lamps that overwhelmed the lights mounted over the park’s main gate and threw shadows much larger than the people who cast them. Lev knew their situation from a constant stream of texts and social media posts. They were down to about forty stalwarts with another sixty or so promising to join or return in the morning.

The police had ordered them to disperse around midnight, but Selma Stanford-Stone had contacted the Trust’s lawyers before Lev even called to ask if she could and someone had convinced the police that Josh and his group could stay.

Lev counted police cars - two from the town acting as lamp stands, four from New York State in a double row blocking the road that led to the park’s main entrance. He double-checked his count, then stared into the darkness and willed his eyes to adjust faster.

“What do you see?” he asked the leadership team almost absent-mindedly as he stared.

Professor Abramczyk had organized marches against racism in the sixties, marches against the Vietnam war in the seventies, and against damned near everything that happened in the eighties. When Lev had asked for anyone with leadership experience back in New York, one of Joel’s students had called him and he’d rushed to join the group. At seventy-five, he was easily fifty years older than the average participant and, Lev had hoped, a voice for mature reason and calm.

“I see the cops protecting a bunch of fucking Nazis,” he declared.

There was a rumble of agreement among the people who’d disembarked to stretch their legs when the buses stopped and were now listening in. Before it could rise to anything else, Rifkeh said, “Too many protestors, not enough cops.”

Dawn pointed to three relatively empty circles of light one at a time, each illuminating a break in the park’s fencing. “Too many entrances to watch, too. The whole presence is at the front gate.”

“Is anybody watching those gates at all?” Lev squinted into the darkness.

“If they are, they’re hiding.” said Jeremy, one of the Gibraltar employees who’d come. Unlike most of the group, Jeremy was neither Jewish nor black. While Lev would never say it out loud, Jeremy looked like a Nazi’s wet dream - blonde buzz-cut, blue eyes, and built like a brick wall. That apparently didn’t stop him from hating Nazis.

Phil, the conflict de-escalation specialist, said. “Maybe we should take a step back here and consider how we’re approaching this. It sounds like you’re treating the park like it’s a battlefield. Are we looking for a fight?”

Lev looked around at the circle of faces. He hadn’t started the night looking for a fight and didn’t think any of them had, but they’d spent the last two hours packed into buses watching the scene unfold on their phones, many consuming a steady stream of social media and sharing what they learned.

The man Lev had seen addressing the protestors was the Reverend Stephen Ilic, a Haderite minister that even some more mainstream Haderite churches felt the need to publicly distance themselves from his particular brand of nationalism, xenophobia, and evangelism. His church was a few hours north of Miller’s Cataract and, depending on whose posts you were reading either “functionally moribund” or “a die-hard core of true believers at the center of a much larger online movement.”

Reverend Ilic had brought a van full of parishoners down to the park and, either by design or coincidence, encountered a bus full of other would-be protestors up from Virginia with a minister of their own. Unlike early reports which suggested it was a “bus full of Nazis,” it was actually a bus carrying roughly a dozen people wearing Nazi regalia or carrying signs with obvious Nazi symbolism and roughly three times their number of people willing to march shoulder-to-shoulder with them. There had been a brief discussion on Lev’s bus as to whether it was correct to call them all Nazis, but it had largely been seen as a distinction without a difference.

And while Reverend Ilic had no history of explicitly pro-Nazi sentiment anyone on the Internet could find, he certainly didn’t seem to mind preaching to people wearing swastika armbands and giving Nazi salutes.

In the intervening hours since Lev had first heard about the protest, locals had trickled into the park roughly doubling the size of the protest. Apparently there were actual Nazis living in Miller County; Lev had never seen one, but maybe they didn’t go around revealing themselves to tall athletic Israelis.

Lev looked at the circle of faces around him. In spite of his trying to put Dawn at the head of this operation, he still had the distinct feeling everyone considered him to be in charge. He was probably unlikely to keep that role if he tried to push them in a direction they didn’t want to go, but he couldn’t work up any real enthusiasm for advocating a peaceful approach anyway. Phil had asked if they were looking for a fight. Lev answered, “I think we’d better be ready for one.”

Phil opened his mouth to argue, but Jeremy spoke first. “We didn’t come all this way to stand at the front gate while the Nazis march around inside the park, did we?”

There was a murmur of agreement that swept outward from the leadership group and looped back as a collective angry growl. Lev looked to Dawn and Rifkeh. “How do we do this?”

They hatched a strategy. Lev called Josh and asked him to send a volunteer around the edge of the park to the nearest empty entrance, confirm there weren’t a mass of police waiting there in the dark, and get a street address to plug into GPS. While that scout was making his way through the darkness, Rifkeh, Jeremy, and another off-duty member of the Loft’s security detail named Walt explained their plan to the group at large and looked for volunteers to march in from the empty-looking entrance and wedge their way in between the torch-bearing Nazis and the visitor center. Their goal was either to create a perimeter around the offending plaque so the crew could come in later that morning and take it down or force the police to take this seriously enough to finally call in reinforcements and start arresting people. At the same time that they marched in from the side entrance, the bulk of their group would pull up front in two of the three buses and join Josh’s group, hopefully keeping police attention focused where it had been this whole time.

Lev thought it was a good plan, but the perverse failure of this situation to go at all as planned gave him one final twist. As Dawn directed side-entrance volunteers onto one bus and non-combatants onto the other two, the volunteer bus filled up much faster than expected. Lev stopped the process and asked for a show of hands who had volunteered and most of the remaining hands went up. A quick conference with Rifkeh, Jeremy, and Walt confirmed that they hadn’t downplayed the risk of violence and/or arrest; Dawn even pointed out that she’d deliberately used the term “non-combatants” to reinforce those possibilities. It hadn’t dissuaded many. Two-thirds of their group still wanted to be part of the group that would wedge themselves between the current protestors and their objective. They rearranged things so that two buses would go to the side entrance while the third led by Phil and Professor Abramczyk would pull up to the front gate and provide a diversion.

Once they had the address, Lev, Rifkeh, and Walt loaded into the front seats of the lead bus. As it pulled away from the shoulder, Lev noticed the heavy silence that had fallen over the volunteers. A few people leaned in like they were whispering to their seatmates, but no one spoke over the engine.

Lev didn’t notice the lack of glowing screens until one reflected off of someone’s glasses. Rifkeh must have seen it too because she was up on her feet in a flash and facing the back of the bus. “In case this needs to be said, nobody tweet about this until it’s over, all right?”

That got a wave of uneasy laughter and broke the tension somewhat. As Lev hurriedly texted to Dawn and Phil that they should give the same warning, Walt rose to stand next to Rifkeh. “Speaking of cell phones, you can leave anything you don’t want the cops finding on the bus. If you’re bringing your phone and you don’t have a lock screen set up, set one up now. Use a code, not facial recognition. That won’t guarantee the police don’t get into your phone, but it will make it harder for them to do so.”

There was a low hum of conversation now as people shared how to lock various phones and maybe some last-minute plans. As the bus pulled onto a surface road, Lev considered texting Nick to give him some heads-up as to what he might have inadvertently gotten himself involved in when he wrote Lev a check two months ago and accepting full responsibility for what came next. But he worried Nick could still try to stop them and that by drawing Nick’s attention, Lev might be responsible for bringing down a response swift enough to stop them even now.

Instead, he texted Selma Stanford-Stone who he’d given regular status updates through the night and from whom he’d gotten some words of caution, but mostly encouragement.

Lev: In MC splitting the group. One bus joining Josh & co at the main entrance, other two going around to unguarded entrance to get inside the park.

Selma: Be careful. Things could get out of control.

Lev paused. It wasn’t possible to tell via text if the last part was meant to be a warning or an expression of excitement. His stomach was already sending him both signals. He’d grown up in Israel knowing every day brought a possibility of real, potentially-lethal violence, but generally managed to avoid anything worse than the equivalent of playground fisticuffs. Even in Brownfield Mills, he’d used his size and presence to imply the possibility of violence far more often than he’d actually laid hands on someone.

On the other hand, his classmates might have been wanna-be gangsters, problem cases, and the occasional meth-head, but they hadn’t been Nazis. He’d always wanted a chance to fight Nazis.

As they disembarked the two buses, Lev and his companions could hear the chanting more regularly now - dozens of voices calling out a cadence. “You ... will not ... replace us! You ... will not ... replace us!” Over and over they repeated it. On every third repetition, some subset of them shouted, “Sieg Heil!”

Lev chanced one more text and got an immediate response.

Lev: Keep those lawyers on speed dial.

Selma: They alway are.

Lev locked his phone and slipped it into his pants pocket. As he took his place at the head of one of the rough columns of protestors, he heard Walt say, “I feel kind of bad for the cops here.”

Rifkeh snorted. “I’m just glad to be on this side of it finally.”

Lev looked back at the group. They were lined up six abreast and stretched off farther than he could see in the dark. They were also as ready as they were going to get.

The ring of marchers inside the park passed a point parallel to the edge of the previously empty gate, close enough now to see individual faces. Lev caught and held his breath, waiting to be noticed, but the protestors were blinded either by their own torches or something that wouldn’t allow them to even consider the possibility of organized opposition to their righteous cause.

As the marchers started the third “You ... Will Not ... Replace us” of their current cycle, Lev gestured to Jeremy and Jeremy pressed a single button on his phone to send a pre-typed message to Phil on the noncombatants’ bus that said “Go now.” At the same time, Lev raised his hand to signal to his own group that they were about to move.

He put his hand up and held it there, watching the column of torch-wielding protestors pass the gate completely and its tail start to arc around behind the visitor center. His hand started to tingle with pins and needles. He imagined a million scenarios where Phil, Joel, and the sixty or so counterprotestors who’d elected to go with them didn’t descend on the front gate as planned.

Then, before Lev could see or hear anything happening at the main gate, the long column of protestors rippled and, for a moment, their chant lost its coherence. The snake no longer spoke with one voice.

Lev lowered his hand and strode forward. “Go.”

His own group moved forward seemingly as one. Within a half-dozen steps, their feet seemed to be moving in unison. Each stride they took sounded like thunder in his ears.

And then Rifkeh yelled, “Let’s replace these motherfuckers!” and a cheer went up, deafening in the near-silence.

The snake rippled again, turned, broke into two parts. Some of the marchers froze, some turned to face the oncoming wave, many scattered. Lev lowered his head and walked forward, afraid that if he saw too much, he would swerve off his chosen path and the column behind him would fall into chaos.

As he got closer, he knew he was playing a low-speed game of chicken. If the Nazis didn’t get out of his way, he would walk right into them, maybe get sucker-punched, maybe worse. On the Nazi side, they had a choice between getting out of the way and potentially being trampled.

He lost his nerve enough to raise his head and look straight ahead again. His eyes locked on the plaque of Hodgeman and Lindburgh and he realized he had a clear lane to his goal. The Nazis had scattered.

He strode forward, Rifkeh on one side, Dawn on the other. They crossed the path the marchers had been using to mark their passage around the visitor center. Behind him, his group fanned out to take up more space and deny the marchers the ground they’d thought safely held.

Lev reached the plaque, turned to face his group, and raised a fist in victory. A second cheer went up just as the first ragged wave of marchers came back into view. The front line was made up almost entirely of young white men with shaved heads, some with Nazi armbands, some with banners displaying the crooked cross, others with American and Confederate flags.

Lev felt a moment of pure joy that made him laugh out loud as he saw that front line of would-be Nazis break up as some froze in their tracks gobsmacked, others tried to keep marching forward, and a third group tried to stop the marchers behind them.

And then they charged.

It wasn’t all of them and the charge was ragged and uncertain at first. The first three to arrive crashed into Lev’s group’s right flank and seemed to fall backwards without anyone having to react. The next group was larger, but by then, many in Lev’s group had turned to face them and a few even charged out to meet them before they could reach their goal. Punches were thrown and people fell.

Lev didn’t wait to see what would happen next. He turned and charged the Nazi front line. As he passed, he felt a sickness in his gut as someone he didn’t know, but who he’d brought here was hit in the head by a Nazi swinging a flagpole with the American flag on the end. But by then it was too late to stop.

He crashed into a cluster of skinheads, fists swinging. Somebody punched him in the ribs. Somebody kicked him in the thigh. He barely felt either blow. He was panting hard and his blood was roaring in his ears. All he could do was focus on who was in front of him, punch the ones who needed punching, and occasionally block a blow meant for him.

He was dimly aware that Rifkeh and Jeffrey were on his left and right respectively. He spared them enough thought to expand his attacks of opportunity to include anyone who seemed to be targeting them.

But mostly he focused on the Nazis with poles and sticks in their hands. Those poles might have flags on one end, the sticks signs, but they were also weapons and the Nazis weren’t shy about wielding them. The first time he tried to get in close, Rifkeh saved him by pushing aside a flagpole aimed at his head so that it only caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder. It still hurt him enough to force a bit of respect in under the red rage driving him. Those signs and flags created drag and he soon learned the trick of dodging them and throwing a quick punch before they could come back.

Watching videos of the fight later, he would see that the whole thing lasted less than six minutes, but he remembered it in distinctive stages - the charge, the battle against the flagpoles, then a long slog where the large weapons had been discarded and most people on both sides had fled out of range leaving no more than maybe twenty active combatants throwing punches and kicks, stomping on the fallen to make sure they stayed down, maximizing the punishment they dished out. During that part of the battle, he’d been completely focused on winning the fight and so sure it could be won.

And then someone had fired the first shot.

As Damaso radioed in their change of destination from the limo’s front seat, Emily raised the partition between them and smiled at Nick. She didn’t realize how much she’d put into the smile until he raised an eyebrow at her. “You seem pleased with yourself, Em.”

Emily rested her back against the partition, kicked off one of her shoes, and deliberately gave him a sultry look. “You have no idea.” She saw concern in his eyes and, before he could say anything, added. “Don’t worry. I’m a little bit drunk, but I’m not that drunk ... not from alcohol anyway. You’re just making me very, very happy, Nick.”

“By taking you to a strip club?” Nick sounded dubious.

Emily couldn’t explain everything at once, so she stretched out her leg and rested her heel on Nick’s knee. “If I asked you to rub my feet, would you?”

Nick took her foot in both hands and pressed his thumbs into the soft part of her sole. Emily bit her lip, wriggled at the sensation, and brought up her other now-bare foot to rest against his wrist. “Now, why are you rubbing my foot?”

Nick didn’t break his rhythm. “Because you asked me to ... sort of.”

“Clive wouldn’t have rubbed my feet if I asked him to. If he was in a good mood, he might offer to pay for a trip to the spa for me, but that kind of a good mood was pretty rare, particularly later on.” Emily sighed and rested her hand on her own thigh, toying with the idea of touching herself while Nick rubbed her foot.

“Not being like Clive has proven to be a pretty low bar,” Nick reminded her.

“Clearly, but you never worried about that bar, did you?” Emily asked.

“Well, I would hate to come in under it.” Nick protested.

“He could have been worse. I didn’t stick around for six years because things were terrible with him. He let me live in a couple of nice apartments, gave me an allowance that could cover my expenses if I was careful and even increased it once he realized how expensive New York was. And he didn’t ask for anything I wasn’t solidly comfortable doing for him. I met plenty of girls who did more and got less out of the deal. I knew how good I had it.” Emily pointed out.

Nick scowled. “You deserved better.”

“In some sense, yes. But, in the sense of what the market would bear, I’d pretty much found the optimal situation and I knew it. I never left Clive for another sugar daddy because I knew I’d never get a better deal. There are girls in New York who do, but I didn’t have what they have.” Emily nudged his wrist. “Other foot, please.”

Nick rested the foot he was holding on his knee and started to rub the other one. “I find it hard to believe there’s anyone out there hotter than you, Emily.”

“That’s probably correct. I’ve never met anyone that I looked at and thought, ‘She is categorically hotter than me.’ If Clive ever thought about trading me in for a younger, hotter model, I doubt he’d find any takers. For that matter, I can’t imagine you meeting someone so much prettier than me that you would cast me aside for her.”

“I...” Nick started to protest, but Emily gestured for him to stop and he did.

“I need to explain this in the right order for you to understand why you make me so very, very happy, Nick. I’ve stopped worrying about you replacing me and what I’m going to do after you and I are through because I know you’re never going to replace me and that I would have to really, really screw up for you to send me away.” Emily sighed as he worked the muscles of her foot.

“You’re not the first woman in my life to mention a fear that I might send her away this week.” Nick frowned. “Am I giving off some weird vibes that suggest I would do that?”

Emily shook her head. “Not even a little. It’s not you at all. For me, it was that I always needed to think about what came next. I couldn’t afford to not land on my feet. Those first couple of years, my biggest fear was that I would somehow wind up on the street and be dragged back to my father and his weird-ass cult. The first night we were in New York, while Clive slept, I went on the Internet and made contingency plans for what I would do if he abandoned me there. But with you, the only reason it took me so long to stop worrying was because I knew I was having the time of my life and that anything else would be a huge letdown.”

Nick again opened his mouth to protest, but stopped himself. “Go on.”

“Right, so when I was with Clive, I knew I was getting just about the best possible deal for who I was at the time - smoking hot, but sexually unadventurous. I knew how to please Clive, but Clive was older and kind of repressed - not in some weird, religious way, just so that it was easier to figure out the five or six things he liked and repeat them ad infinitum rather than keeping a list of all the things he didn’t like. The girls who got the really gold-plated deals were practically superheroes. If you took my looks, combined them with Kiki’s wildness, threw in Pilar’s fearless Nick-pleasing skills, and tossed in a Russian accent for good measure, you’d have one of these girls.”

“Nick-pleasing skills?” Nick smirked.

Emily laughed. “You must have noticed by now that there are certain qualities Kiki, Pilar, Ainsley, Arwen, and Rosangela share - certain ways they and now finally I approach the relationship, how we talk to you, how seriously we take things. You don’t think you randomly hired four lingerie models, two SSCS field agents, and a lawyer who just happened to already be a little kinky, fundamentally bisexual, and willing to share, do you?”

“I don’t...” Nick stopped and looked deeply thoughtful and Emily worried she’d said too much too fast, but he recovered. “I have to admit I haven’t thought about it much in those terms, but it makes sense. I never meant for anyone to change for my sake, though.”

Emily looked down her leg and her own foot held in his momentarily-still hands. “Are your hands tired?”

Nick tried an experimental press. “My left thumb is cramped up. I’m afraid I don’t know whatever trick Monica does to rub for more than a couple of minutes. I can work with the right hand, though.”

Emily withdrew her feet and sat up straighter. “No need. You’ve illustrated my point brilliantly. Do you want to make me and the rest of them happy?”

“Sure, of course.” Nick answered.

“Okay, well we want to make you happy, too. When I first started my relationship with Clive, I didn’t really think about what would make him happy beyond the obvious. I made choices in the moment that weren’t really important to me that, if I’d understood him better, I could have just as happily made an opposite choice and he would have had a better time. I spent years guessing what he would like based on what I understood men like him should like rather than listening to what he was trying to tell me he did like. By the time I realized I could make our relationship better at practically no cost to my own happiness, I’d already shown my hand. It was artificial and forced, which he definitely didn’t like. I didn’t make as many mistakes with you.” Emily smiled sadly. In some ways, she’d been very fond of Clive.

“You weren’t sixteen when we met. “ Nick pointed out.

“No, but I definitely started out trying to apply what I learned from being with Clive. I adjusted based on what you taught me about yourself, but that could have taken years of trying to do what had kept me in Clive’s good graces if I hadn’t finally started to figure out Pilar.”

“That you might have to share with me. I still haven’t figured out Pilar.” Nick chuckled.

“You’ve probably figured her out better than I have. I just figured out the parts that made absolutely no sense to me. She’s clearly the most important woman in your life, but...”

“I...”

Emily gave Nick a look. “Nick, it’s okay to not treat each of us equally. We’re your lovers, not your children.”

Nick sighed and sat back. “I’m not sure I agree with your assessment. You’re each important to me in such a different way, I don’t see any point in the comparison.”

“Okay, fine.” Emily chuckled. “Let me say that Pilar is central to your life. You spend the most time with her. You trust her to organize the most intimate part of your schedule. When you swap with another couple, she’s the one you think of yourself as being in a couple with. Even if we’re all equal in your estimation, she’s first among equals. She’s like the pope of your harem.”

Nick laughed out loud. “Okay, fine. Without comparing specialness among my favorite people in the world, she’s clearly special to me.”

“Right - and what I couldn’t figure out was why she was constantly putting that in jeopardy.” Emily took a deep breath. “You know, if you and I had gotten together before you and Pilar, this would be a very different story. I would not have invited her into bed with us. I wouldn’t have encouraged Kiki to keep coming back. And I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to swap with Lev and Arwen.”

She thought for sure Nick would have something to say about that; after his second almost-start and lapse into thoughtful silence, she ploughed forward. “I think by now we’d both be pretty miserable with that.”

“I don’t...” Nick looked down at his hands. “Em, that’s crazy.”

“Is it?” Emily gave him another sad smile.

“Sure, anyone who was miserable being with Emily King would be ... insane,” said Nick.

Emily accepted his compliment with a nod. “I’m sure we would have some very happy times, but I never would have been happy with Arwen living under your roof no matter how many times you swore to me nothing was going to happen between you two. I wouldn’t have wanted you to be close to Pilar or Inez or Opal or that slut Kiki who you slept with once or Hall and Cat with their weird, unnatural approach to marriage. I wouldn’t have wanted you to throw a big party for Verity. I would have found myself besieged by rivals and I would have made you miserable for it. If you hadn’t broken up with me by now, you would definitely be looking for an excuse to do so.”

Nick considered her for a few seconds, then said dryly. “You do sound pretty terrible when you put it that way.”

Emily nodded. “And all I had to do in order to be the happiest I’ve ever been is not do any of the things I’d learned I was supposed to. Pilar was smart enough not to treat you like a richer version of Geoff. I wouldn’t have known that trick without her example to learn from. To me, it looked like she was doing everything she could to lose you. One second.”