Looking for Rachel Wallace

16

The Boston Globe is in a building on Morrissey Boulevard which looks like the offspring of a warehouse and a suburban junior high school. It used to be on Washington Street in the middle of the city and looked like a newspaper building should. But that was back when the Post was still with us, and the Daily Record. Only yesterday. When the world was young.

It was the day after they took Rachel and snowing again. I was talking to Wayne Cosgrove in the city room about right-wing politics, on which he’d done a series three years earlier.

“I never heard of RAM,” he said. Cosgrove was thirty-five, with a blond beard. He had on wide-wale corduroy pants and a gray woolen shirt and a brown tweed jacket. His feet were up on the desk. On them he wore leather boots with rubber bottoms and yellow laces. A blue down parka with a hood hung on the back of his chair.

“God you look slick, Wayne,” I said. “You must have been a Nieman Fellow some time.”

“A year at Harvard,” he said, “picks up your taste like a bastard.” He’d grown up in Newport News, Virginia, and still had the sound of it when he talked.

“I can see that,” I said. “Why don’t you look in your files and see if you have anything on RAM?”

“Files,” Cosgrove said, “I don’t need to show no stinking files, gringo.” He told me once that he’d seen The Treasure of the Sierra Madre four times at a revival house in Cambridge.

“You don’t have any files?”

He shrugged. “Some, but the good stuff is up here, in the old coconut. And there ain’t nothing on RAM. Doesn’t matter. Groups start up and fold all the time, like sub sandwich shops. Or they change the name, or a group splinters off from another one. If I had done that series day before yesterday, I might not have heard of RAM, and they might be this week’s biggie. When I did the series, most of the dippos were focused on busing. All the mackerel-snappers were afraid of the niggers’ fucking their daughters, and the only thing they could think of to prevent that was to keep the niggers away from their daughters. Don’t seem to speak too highly of their daughters’ self-control, but anyway if you wanted to get a group started, then you went over to Southie and yelled nigger nigger.”

He pronounced it niggah.

“Isn’t that a technique that was developed regionally?”

“Ahhh, yes,” Cosgrove said. “Folks down home used to campaign for office on that issue, whilst you folks up north was just a tsk-tsking at us and sending in the feds. Fearful racism there was, in the South, in those days.”

“Didn’t I hear you were involved in freedom riding, voter registration, and Communist subversion in Mississippi some years back?”

“I had a northern granddaddy,” Cosgrove said. “Musta come through on a gene.”

“So where are all the people in this town who used to stand around chanting never and throwing rocks at children?”

Cosgrove said, “Most of them are saying, ‘Well, hardly ever.’ But I know what you’re after. Yeah, I’d say some of them, having found out that a lot of the niggers don’t want to fuck their daughters, are now sweating that the faggots will bugger their sons and are getting up a group to throw rocks at fairies.”

“Any special candidates?”

Cosgrove shrugged, “Aw, shit, I don’t know, buddy. You know as well as I do that the hub of any ultra-right-wing piece of business in this metropolitan area is Fix Farrell. For Christ’s sake, he’s probably anti-Eskimo.”

“Yeah, I know about Farrell, but I figure a guy like him wouldn’t involve himself in a thing like this.”

“ ‘Cause he’s on the city council?” Cosgrove said. “How the hell old are you?”

“I don’t argue he’s honest, I just argue he doesn’t need this kind of action. I figure a guy like him benefits from people like Rachel Wallace. Gives him someone to be against. Farrell wouldn’t want her kidnaped and her book suppressed. He’d want her around selling it at the top of her lungs so he could denounce her and promulgate plans to thwart her.”

Cosgrove tapped his teeth with the eraser end of a yellow pencil. “Not bad,” he said. “You probably got a pretty good picture of Fix at that.”

“You think he might have any thoughts on who I should look into?”

Cosgrove shook his head very quickly. “No soap. Farrell’s never going to rat on a possible vote—and anybody opposed to a gay feminist activist can’t be all bad in Fix’s book.”

“You think the RAM people would trust him?” I said.

“How the fuck would I know?” Cosgrove said. “Jesus, Spenser, you are a plugger, I’ll say that for you.”

“Hell of a bodyguard, too,” I said.

Cosgrove shrugged. “I’ll ask around; I’ll talk it up in the city room. I hear anything, I’ll give you a buzz.”

“Thank you,” I said, and left.