Every Man a King

5

The vacuum Aja left in the office and in my chest did not feel good. She was right about Quiller, but even though I agreed with her politics, I was bound to take his case, so it felt right to feel bad about what had to be done.

Alfred Xavier Quiller enrolled at MIT at the age of fourteen. He graduated in twenty-one months and then designed a car engine that ran on oil derived from the seeds of a weed that grows mostly in Utah. He’d begun plausible research on a Malaysian spider that lives and works with others of its kind. He’d made a theoretical model that would increase the tensile strength of the webs of this species and proposed to farm them for a viable alternative to steel. Before he came up on the government’s bad list he’d begun work on a cannon that could, literally, shoot a spaceship to the moon and beyond.

Quiller was a landscape painter and a passable poet. He served as an intelligence interpreter in the army for three years before receiving an honorable discharge. He’d also been a freehand rock climber of some renown among the advocates of that sport.

On the other hand, Quiller had started the three-fifths movement when he was only fifteen, positing that so-called white men had proven throughout history that they were at least 40 percent more productive and therefore more valuable to the human species than any other group or gender. Because of this truth, he said that all the colored races and white women should be limited to 60 percent of full voting rights unless they took a test proving their equivalence, or, as some have said, their whiteness. Because of an extremely long, and yet still bogus, statistical equation white men would not be required to take this test. Quiller proved to himself that he wasn’t a misogynist because he believed in the evolution of the hyena, which made the female the superior.

The race-baiter continually misinterpreted Darwin, like so many others have, by replacing the word fittest with strongest in the survival dictum of that great thinker.

In short — he was a man of towering intelligence fueled by a zealot’s ignorance.

Recently, while on the run from the Justice Department, Quiller stopped long enough to create an hour-long Quiller-Talk explaining further ruminations on the place of women in the modern polity. He claimed, vehemently, that even though women were inferior to white men in the political realm, they were actually more important as citizens. Further research, he revealed, had discovered that women were 79 percent more influential in child-rearing than men. Because of this lopsided social advantage, Quiller felt it necessary to apologize for his deprecatory diatribes on femininity in the past and also to say that women should always be given the benefit of the doubt in any constitutional question that didn’t concern the vote.

I found myself wondering about the reasons behind this public apology and ultimate rejiggering of his political beliefs. It came as a surprise that I was beginning to have empathy for the man whom I’d started out hating as much as my daughter did.

What intrigued me about his movement in the alt-right world of race-baiting was that there was no group I could find that he identified with — beyond the nebulous concept of whiteness that he used as a template for history. He was happy to include Black people, for instance, in the American polity as long as each individual had only a 60 percent share of a single vote. And if a Black or brown person proved that they were as good as white by passing his test, then Quiller had no problem with allowing them to be equal.

I could see why Aja hated him. The arrogance left a bad taste.

And Aja was right about his obsession, not only with whiteness but also with being a man. Even white women had to take the voting rights equivalency test.

He was forty-eight years old, a staunch supporter of animal rights, a vegetarian who ate shellfish now and then, and an extraordinarily prolific writer. Alfred did not sleep much — two hours every night with a one-hour nap sometime in the day. He had written and self-published a fifty-eight-volume collection concerning his political beliefs. This collection was titled Testimony. He claimed that it was his proof of the superiority of certain groups within a species.

Testimony had gone out of print four years before and there were precious few editions available.

Two years before Roger hired me, Quiller left the country under a cloud of suspicion from the federal government. It seemed as if, through his space cannon research, he’d come across a plan that some nut had to shoot bombs into space that would be hidden from foreign tracking. Somehow this doomsday construction would be useful when the Chinese or the Russians tried to invade Faneuil Hall.

A document detailing this plan had made it to Space Cannon headquarters and from there it may have been delivered to the Russians. It was clear that Quiller had seen the documents but less so that he distributed them.

At any rate, the forty percenter left the U.S. and made his way to and through those nations that did not have extradition treaties with America.

When I executed a search for the name Curt Holiday I came up with a murder investigation in Togo. Quiller was named as a person of interest (however you say that in Togolese) in the murder of Holiday in Quiller’s waterfront apartment. Holiday had been shot six times. After the slaying, Quiller flew to Cape Verde. A week later a Togolese representative was invited to question Quiller. After this interrogation the charges were dropped.

The State Department was not happy that one of its citizens could be murdered and forgotten so easily and issued an international warrant for Quiller’s arrest. Sometime after that Quiller moved to Little Peach in Belarus.

The best word I can use to describe my research is sordid. Quiller’s mother, Visalia Rill, put him up for adoption at the age of four. She said that his father was a one-night stand and that the only thing she knew about him was that his name was Quiller. Her son, she said, had been an unruly child from the moment he could sit up straight.

The articles I read about the boy Alfred said nothing about his behavior, but it might say something that he was never adopted.

Years later when Visalia realized how successful her son had become, she tried to get in touch with him. She was living six miles deep on the wrong side of the tracks in Gary, Indiana, and hoped that he would take her in.

He did not, and after seven months of trying to have a personal audience with her son, she ate poison and died.

I tried to understand what it would feel like to be Mr. Quiller. It seemed that all he had to rely on was his mind. He couldn’t trust anybody and nobody loved him enough to include him in their lives. His mother neglected him and when he returned the treatment she committed suicide.

The phone rang while I was considering the subject of my investigation. I could tell by the light that it was an interoffice call.

“Yes, honey,” I said using the speaker mode.

“I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t mean to get on you so bad.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I’m proud of you being so passionate about us. And you’re right — this guy’s a piece of work.”

“That’s not you.”

“No. But I have to make sure that I don’t end up supporting his crazy agenda.”

We talked for a while about my research and how I felt about it.

After that I asked, “Anything else?”

“Uh-huh. Mom’s on line two.”