The quiet Upper Manhattan cul-de-sac that housed both Spotty Spitford’s home and his church was located on a rise overlooking the Hudson River. Ornamental wrought-iron gates guarded the block’s entrance, where one sign warned PRIVATE WAY, WALK YOUR HORSES and another marked the site of General Washington’s headquarters during the retreat from the Battle of Harlem Heights. The street was still cobblestone, shaded by an avenue of venerable beech trees. Most of the row houses displayed carefully-tended, if unimaginative, window-box gardens: geraniums, columbines, hosta. Spitford’s own residence, a three-story structure in the renaissance revival style, was sheltered by a hedge of Queen Anne’s lace. The hedge wanted trimming. Arnold recalled the lines from Richard II: Noisome weeds which without profit suck the soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers. Yes, Spitford was one of those. But seeing his dishevelled shrubbery, his overgrown pachysandra, Arnold fought the urge to lecture the agitator about the need for periodic pruning.
Spitford’s neighbourhood was only a twenty-five minute subway ride from Arnold’s townhouse, but it had taken the botanist nearly three hours to get uptown. He didn’t dare ride public transportation, and two cabbies had refused to drive him, before he’d found a third, a white-bearded Sikh, who clearly had no idea who he was. But then the taxi had been pulled over for a broken taillight, and he’d had to negotiate the final fifteen blocks up Broadway on foot. Luckily, it was well past midnight, so the streets were nearly deserted. Anyone who was still awake had sidewalks to hose down, or Chinese food to deliver, or prostitutes to manage—in short, business to attend to that left little time for recognizing or harassing Arnold. When he finally reached Spitford’s street, nearly all of the homes were already dark. A solitary lamppost illuminated a small corner of sidewalk, where an obese raccoon rummaged among aluminium trashcans. Farther up the block, although it was mid-spring, one file of second story windows remained framed by multi-coloured Christmas bulbs. Beyond that stood the gargoyled church, its imposing gothic silhouette rising above the river. The night was overcast and muggy, punctuated by gusts of warm wind. In Spitford’s residence, a light glowed in an upstairs window. Arnold double-checked the address from the phonebook against the brass numbers posted on Spitford’s front door. He mounted the steps and pressed the buzzer.
Arnold’s temper hadn’t calmed since discovering the garden massacre—if anything, his anger had increased on the trip uptown. But now, listening to the groan of distant stairs, he second-guessed himself. Why did challenging Spitford at the man’s own residence suddenly seem unreasonable to Arnold? Wasn’t that what the minister had been doing to him all week? But it was nearly one o’clock in the morning. Something about the hot, stagnant spring night reminded Arnold of the Klansmen who used to waylay black ministers outside their homes. Then another concern struck Arnold: What if Spitford turned violent? For all he knew, the man might keep a shotgun at his bedside. He scanned the stoop for anything he might use as a makeshift weapon, but except for the welcome mat and the milk bin, the area was bare. And then it was too late. The door opened—not a crack, but all the way, and swiftly, as though in defiance of any lurking danger. Spitford loomed in the doorway. The minister was fully attired in his double-breasted black suit, with the gold chain of his watch poking out of his pocket. His reading glasses sat perched on his flat nose and he held a book under his arm. Without his sunglasses, he looked much older.
“Yes?” demanded the minister.
“It’s Arnold Brinkman,” retorted Arnold. “The man you’ve been harassing.”
Spitford tucked his glasses into his breast pocket. “So?”
“So this has to stop,” said Arnold. “You’re going to pay for my garden and you’re going to get your goddam goons away from my house.”
The minister raised his eyebrows. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen, Mr. Brinkman,” he said. He spoke politely, almost sympathetically, as though the matter were well beyond his control. Nothing in his tone suggested the least displeasure at having been summoned to the door in the middle of the night. He’d probably have displayed the same mildly intrigued expression if he’d been purchasing Girl Scout cookies. But it was one o’clock in the morning! The man had no right to equanimity—his very reasonableness seemed unreasonable to Arnold.
“Don’t you ‘Mr. Brinkman’ me,” shouted Arnold. “It took me thirty years to build that goddam garden.”
Arnold’s voice was far too loud for the street; his words echoed in his ears. At the same time, a door creaked behind Spitford. The minister ducked his head inside and said, in the gentlest voice, “It’s nothing, Mother. Just business. Please go back to bed.” When his gaze returned to Arnold, it was not nearly as friendly.
“This is neither the time,” said Spitford, “nor the place—”
“—You leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone.”
“As I was saying, Mr. Brinkman, this is neither the time nor the place. However, since you’ve come all this way, I can spare you a few moments. But why don’t we step over to the church? You possess a very loud voice, Mr. Brinkman, and my mother is not a heavy sleeper.”
The minister drew the door shut behind him and led Arnold twenty yards down the sidewalk. They stood directly in front of the Church of the Crusader, where a black and white sign read: “God Hates Sin.” Another banner, proclaiming IT’S NOT A CHOICE, IT’S A HOLOCAUST, hung above the towering stained glass windows.
Spitford flipped open his watch and noted the time. Then he stuffed his fleshy hands into his trouser pockets. “Here’s how it is, Mr. Brinkman,” he said. “You’ve made some terrible mistakes and the only thing to be done is to ask for forgiveness. That’s what the Lord wants. That’s what I want. Too many men have died for America to let you mock their courage. If you don’t make amends, I’m afraid you’re going to have to face the consequences.”
That’s what it was all about to Spitford: consequences, a simple matter of cause and effect. As though the universe were an enormous billiard table under the supervision of a Newtonian deity, some celestial engineer who managed the human drama with mathematical precision. The minister’s confidence irked Arnold. “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”
“The truth is, Mr. Brinkman, I do have better things to do with my time.” Spitford’s voice was deep and resonant. “We live in a culture of death, where radical homosexuals are corrupting our children and bloodthirsty abortionists are committing a genocide that makes the African slave trade pale by comparison. Every day that I’m compelled to squander outside your house, waiting for an apology, is one more day lost to unnecessary distraction. But what am I to do? This is what the Lord has asked of me and I have no choice but to obey.”
Arnold tried to keep his cool. “The Lord wants you to ruin my life?”
“The Lord wants you to apologize.”
“Well He’s going to have a long wait,” snapped Arnold. “Next time you speak to Him, tell Him to go screw himself with a chainsaw.”
Spitford remained unflappable. “You’re a very angry man, Mr. Brinkman.”
That was too much. “Wouldn’t you be angry if a pack of Black Nazis—that’s right, the goddam Black Gestapo—tore up your garden?”
The minister shook his head. “I want to give you fair warning,” he said softly. “It has come to my attention that you did far more than insult the flag at that baseball game. I have four witnesses willing to swear that you were teaching racial epithets to a child. I doubted these young men as first—quite honestly, you didn’t strike me as the type. But what I’ve heard tonight confirms my fears, rather than my hopes. Tomorrow morning, Mr. Brinkman, I’m going to have no choice but to expose your views. All I can say is that I hope you’ll take this as an opportunity to get right with God.”
“The kid asked a question,” objected Arnold. “I was just trying to explain….”
He looked up into Spitford’s hard glare and stopped speaking. What could he possibly say? Spitford was far too certain, far too persuasive, to be outmanoeuvred verbally. A few more exchanges and he’d probably have Arnold convinced that his actions were indeed clouded by prejudice—that the botanist had discriminated in hiring, or locked his car doors unnecessarily, or masterminded the assassination of Malcolm X. People who professed to know everything were always perpetrating that sort of “instant brainwash” on people like Arnold. He thought of what Spitford’s goons had done to his garden—the decapitated dianthus, the mangled viburnum branches—and, for the first time in his adult life, he truly hated another human being.
“Do you own a copy of the scriptures, Mr. Brinkman?” asked Spitford. “If you don’t, why not take mine? Maybe it will soothe some of your bitterness.” The minister clasped Arnold’s hands and folded them around the Bible, his own fingers warm against the botanist’s clammy flesh. “Even the most hardened racist can mend his ways.”
This last accusation jolted Arnold alert. How dare this priggish homophobic Neanderthal—this Uncle Tom—call him a bigot? “I was trying to explain to my nephew what a nigger was,” shouted the botanist. “Well, you’re a goddam nigger. And I don’t mean the colour of your skin. I mean the content of your character.”
Spitford stepped backwards, apparently nonplussed. His eyes bulged; a vein in his forehead pulsed ominously. He started to speak several times, but all he managed to produce was a short choking sound. When he reached into his jacket pocket, Arnold feared the man might draw a pistol—but instead he produced a paisley handkerchief and dabbed at his temples. “Good evening, Mr. Brinkman,” he said.
“The evening’s not over yet,” responded Arnold. “Not by a long-shot.”
He raised the book above his shoulder and hurled it across the churchyard. It slammed into the decorative window, shattering the stained glass.
“You show up at my house again tomorrow,” shouted Arnold, “and I’ll cut you in half with my chainsaw.”
The botanist turned on his heels and walked swiftly into the darkness.
Once he’d left Spitford’s, Arnold wasn’t sure why he’d ever gone. To threaten the minister? To annoy him? If so, he recognized he’d failed on both counts. It was now apparent to him that the minister was one of those fatalistic men who could never be annoyed, not by anything, because every inconvenience and aggravation was part of a divine scheme to draw him closer to Jesus on the cross. If that meant martyrdom, so much the better. Just as the followers of Calvin had once measured their heavenly value in earthly goods, the Spitfords of the world used pain as a benchmark for human worth. The more they suffered, the happier they were. Which made Arnold’s threats utterly futile. Not that he was actually going to attack the minister with a chainsaw—but even if he did, Spitford would count each missing limb as a special gift from God. Or would he? In his gut, Arnold still harboured doubts. He sensed a certain shrewdness, even guile, behind Spitford’s indignation. A servant of the Lord, maybe, but not one above cutting corners. The man would certainly crack a few innocent eggs to make an omelette for Christ. For whatever reason, he’d apparently decided to make Arnold into one of those eggs.
But what troubled Arnold the most about the encounter—even more than the minister’s intransigence—was his own anger. He had levelled a racial slur at the man and tossed a Bible through a church window. Neither of these were capital offenses, and both had been provoked, but now he understood how otherwise decent people could explode on occasion and gun down their co-workers or their in-laws in cold blood. If he’d had a gun, he could easily have lost his temper enough to take a shot at Spitford. Which meant what? That hot-headed people shouldn’t be issued gun licenses? Or that the enemies of hot-tempered people ought to be issued bullet-proof vests? Maybe that anybody accused of a violent crime should be sent to an anger management course and given a second chance. That sounded like good social policy—but it didn’t excuse Arnold’s outburst. On the other hand, there was no epithet too harsh for a man like Spitford. Even if Arnold had thrown a thousand Bibles through a thousand church windows, or burned Notre Dame to its foundations, it wouldn’t have squared the score with the Bible-thumpers after what those Black Nazis had done to Arnold’s garden. In other words, what he’d done to Spitford had been both highly justified and utterly inexcusable.
Arnold braved the subway ride to the Village. It was nearly four o’clock on a Friday morning and the odds of extensive human contact were low. The only other person on the platform was a shirtless, disfigured African-American wino strumming a broken ukulele. It sounded like the guy was attempting to sing O Susannah! but he had few teeth and his mouth was far too misshapen to articulate the words. Arnold generally didn’t give to the homeless individually—he preferred to send his donations to reputable, high-profile organizations of the sort that offered complimentary return-address labels—but a sudden yearning to demonstrate that he wasn’t a racist, maybe even to prove that he was a decent human being, took hold of him. He fished in his pockets and handed the man a ten dollar bill. The man growled what might have been a “thank you.” So far, so good. But then a gleam appeared in the guy’s eyes, a burst of sudden lucidity, as though the universe had been clarified for him or his crooning had conjured up a private vision of the Virgin Mary. The man opened his engorged mouth and stuck out a large diseased tongue. “God bless!” he cried. “God bless!” After that, he chased Arnold across the platform as though he might lick him, his tongue hanging from his foaming mouth like that of a rabid hound. Fortunately, the train arrived a moment later and the botanist darted into the final car as the doors closed. Unfortunately, he’d been so aggravated by the episode that he’d boarded an uptown train by mistake. At the next station, he’d had to get off and switch directions.
When Arnold finally arrived at Sheridan Square, shortly before five o’clock, he realized that he didn’t want to return home. Not yet. Judith would be awake, he was sure, waiting to press him for the details of his encounter with Spitford, and inevitably, against his better judgment, he’d share them. Arnold had never mastered the art of lying to his wife, even when it served their mutual interests. So he shared secrets that would have best been kept to himself—whether a clinically insignificant rise in his cholesterol level, which was bound to cause Judith unnecessary worry, or a colleague’s infidelity, which might forever doom the man in her eyes. Once, Arnold had thrown Judith a surprise birthday party—fifty of their dearest friends at the Swiss bistro with the authentic cuckoo clocks—but he’d broken down and confessed on the stroll to the restaurant. He just wasn’t wired for dishonesty. Moreover, the problem with deceiving your spouse was that you couldn’t tell only one lie. Constant companionship forced you to cover your tracks, weaving more intricate falsehoods until neither of you knew what was true any longer. Arnold wanted no part of that. But he also didn’t want Judith raking him over the coals for losing his cool with Spitford. He cringed at the thought of sharing what he’d said about the content of the man’s character. It wasn’t Judith’s reaction only that he dreaded—although his wife, who’d sided with a contingent of St. Gregory’s parents protesting the use of the adverb “niggardly” in a school budget report, was unlikely to sympathize with his conduct. He was also sincerely embarrassed, not because he would have retracted his statement, but because language that might have been perfectly suited for a heated confrontation would seem ridiculous when repeated in his living room. And there was another reason Arnold didn’t want to return home: He couldn’t handle the thought of waking up to tend the garden that was no longer there.
A whisper of light was already visible in the pink-grey sky, and the starlings were scavenging around the mesh garbage cans, when Arnold walked past Sixth Street and headed toward the nursery. The cot in his office might not be the city’s most comfortable bed—he’d have to clear the tubs of pepper seedlings off the mattress—but at least he wouldn’t be disturbed. That would give him time to prepare for Judith. And to figure out his next course of action. Maybe he would sue Spitford over the garden. Wasn’t the best defence a strong offense? But all of that planning would have to wait until after a good night’s sleep. Or at least a power nap. Right now, he could hardly keep his eyes open.
Much to Arnold’s surprise, the showroom lights were illuminated in the nursery. Maybe this was another of Guillermo’s security measures, he figured. But then he crossed through the hangar and found the manager himself awake in his office. The Venezuelan was lying on the sofa, staring wide-eyed at the popcorn ceiling. A bag of soy chips and a no-calorie vitamin drink lay on the floor nearby. On the manager’s desk, at the opposite end of the room, stood a conspicuous orange sunflower in a bud vase.
Arnold knocked on the open door. Guillermo glanced in his direction, then returned his gaze upward.
“What are you doing here?” asked Arnold.
“Thinking.”
“I thought that was my job.”
“We do different kinds of thinking. I’ve been thinking about business.”
“Have you?”
“I had Lucinda run some numbers for me,” said Guillermo. He sat up and rolled down his sleeves one at a time, fastening the buttons. “Do you know how many individual plants we sold last year during the second week of May?”
“I don’t have the foggiest idea.”
“Seven hundred forty-eight,” answered Guillermo. Arnold had little doubt the Venezuelan could itemize each sale, if asked. “Do you know how many individual plants we’ve sold over the last five days?”
“Not as many, I suppose.”
“Thirty-nine.”
“That’s definitely not as many.” Arnold hadn’t expected the number to be that low. “I take it that’s not just a glitch in the business cycle…”
The Venezuelan folded his arms across his chest. “It’s a glitch in the political cycle, Arnold.”
“You mean to tell me people aren’t buying my plants because they don’t like my politics?”
“That’s what it looks like. Or they do like your politics, privately, but they’re afraid to be seen here. Or they just want to stay clear of trouble. Who knows? The bottom line is that we’re haemorrhaging cash.”
“So you think I should apologize.”
“I’m not saying that. I told you I don’t go near that stuff,” said Guillermo. “What I’m telling you is that if you don’t intend to apologize, you’d better come up with a plan B before we go bankrupt.”
“And if I don’t have a plan B?”
Guillermo removed a toothpick from a tiny see-through case and twirled it between his lips. “I’m not too worried. The bosses always have a plan B.”
The Venezuelan stood up. “Time to call it a day,” he said. “Any interest in breakfast?”
“Go ahead,” said Arnold. “I’m not done thinking yet.”
The truth was that he would have loved breakfast—and companionship—but he was afraid to show his face in public.
“Okay, suit yourself. By the way, your wife called looking for you. Twice.”
“I had an errand to run.”
“She told me all about it,” said Guillermo. “I trust you didn’t kill the guy.”
Arnold didn’t say anything.
“On second thought, if you did, I don’t want to know.” The Venezuelan retrieved his cap from the hat rack. “By the way, aren’t you going to ask me about the flower?”
“Sure. What’s with the flower?”
“It’s for you. From that girl. They delivered it this morning while you were going through your DO NOT DISTURB phase.”
Arnold walked over to the vase and examined the miniature card. It read:
CAN WE TALK ON THE RECORD? CASSANDRA
Guillermo chuckled. “Are you going to talk to her?”
“She’s off her gourd,” said Arnold. “Why in the word would anyone send me flowers. I own a nursery for Christ’s sake.”
“I think it was supposed to be a joke,” said the Venezuelan.
Some joke. He’d lost the garden it had taken him a lifetime to cultivate and she’d sent him a droopy, dehydrated supermarket flower in a pot of lukewarm tap water. A gift that ranked right up there with sending condoms to nuns or lampshades to holocaust survivors. Who the hell did this girl think she was? The sunflower didn’t make him want to give her an interview—it made him want to call her and scream at her. To tell her that his life was falling apart, piece by piece, and the last thing he needed was some teenybopper cub reporter sending him gag presents and stirring up trouble. What he really wanted to do was to shout at her until she realized that his life was no joking matter and certainly not a tool for left-wing propagandists. Maybe that had been her intended effect.
“Most people laugh at jokes,” said Guillermo, “or at least smile.”
“I’m guffawing in my head.”
“Whatever, boss,” said the Venezuelan. “Don’t forget to breathe.”
Guillermo departed and Arnold heard the manager’s footsteps echoing across the hangar, then the pulse of the door chime as the Venezuelan exited out to the street. The botanist retrieved the sunflower and carried the vase into his own office. He cleared the pepper tubs from the cot, brushing away crumbs of fertilizer, but he was no longer sleepy. Why couldn’t the damn girl just leave him alone? He was having a hard enough time as it was. Nothing he’d ever done was so horrific that it merited a supermarket cutting. Arnold removed the sunflower from its stand. He clipped the stem with surgical expertise and set the stalk in a glass of distilled, refrigerated water. He verified the temperature. Thirty-five degrees. Next, he checked the pH. Five. Far too high. So he added lemon juice, bead by bead, with an eyedropper. Florence Nightingale could have done no better. Tomorrow, the drooping stalk might hope for at least a limited recovery. When the first aid was done, Arnold reached across the desk absentmindedly and flipped on the television.
The botanist recognized the voice before he saw the face: the affected English accent, the effeminate lisp, the mouth draw tight as that of a ventriloquist. There was no mistaking that voice—like a gay, aristocratic Charlie McCarthy. And there was its owner, Arnold’s ex-brother-in-law, being interviewed beneath a coconut palm. Vince Sprague was one of those rare men over sixty-five who actually looked good in a crotch-hugging swimsuit. Celeste’s former husband boasted that he did five hundred push-ups every morning, half of them on his knuckles; at a dinner party, several years earlier, he’d consumed too much port and bench-pressed the host’s piano. Sprague’s chest was tan and waxed and as defined as a Michelangelo sketch. Even the muscles in his neck were as thick as those in Arnold’s legs.
“Of course, I am quite disturbed,” said Sprague. “If you’ll pardon my French, it’s bloody outrageous. Categorically despicable. I am not myself an aficionado of American baseball, you understand, nor am I an American citizen, but on the occasions when I have found myself at such a match, I have always risen for the national anthem. I cannot imagine what lapse of judgment allowed my ex-wife to trust our son to such a misguided—if not outright dangerous—influence.”
Arnold pounded his fist on the desktop. “You’re from Staten Island, goddamit,” he shouted at the television. “You’re not a citizen because you renounced your citizenship to avoid paying income tax.”
“I did not know Mr. Brinkman well myself,” continued Sprague. “I tried to avoid him, to tell you the truth. I always thought him somewhat unscrupulous.”
Amazing! The man sells thousands of teenage girls into prostitution, abandons his wife and son for a Romanian gymnast one-third his age, flees the country to avoid a federal indictment so long it contains an index, and doesn’t even send Celeste a dime of child-support—and now he’s calling Arnold unscrupulous. Why didn’t they ask Sprague why he hadn’t taken the boy to the baseball game? Why he hadn’t sent the boy so much as a postcard in six years? Because they wanted Arnold to lose, that’s why. Because now the object of this game was to see how much dirt they could pile on Arnold before he suffocated. They could discover that he’d spent the last thirty years reading bedtime stories to blind nuns, or that he’d been a POW in southeast Asia, and they’d still find a way to spin the news against him. Even if it were discovered that he were a paraplegic who suffered tongue spasms, that the entire incident had been involuntary, they’d rake him across the coals for not seeking pre-emptive treatment.
“I am consulting with my attorneys,” said Sprague. “I intend to take every necessary measure to make certain this blasted outrage does not recur in the future.”
“I’m not the outrage, dammit!” shouted Arnold. “You’re the outrage!”
He stormed out of the office, carrying the sunflower with him. Never in his life could Arnold recall being so worn down—so close to snapping. Usually, a few hours hoeing in the garden would tranquilize his nerves, but that was no longer a possibility. Nor was a hug from Judith. The only other genuine pleasure the botanist could think of were the hothouses, where they kept the tropical plants and exotics. One of these greenhouses was dry and served the cactus. The other, the wet greenhouse, contained liana-draped banana thickets and Brazil nut trees festooned with orchids. The Garden Centre’s stock of bromeliads was the most impressive private collection in the world. Nominally, all of these plants were for sale—which was essential, according to Lucinda, for taxation purposes. In reality, few if any of the rarer specimens ever found a buyer. Even in the West Village, there was little market for $15,000 pitcher plants. Arnold loved the scents of the wet greenhouse: Not just the sweet aroma of bee-pollinated flowers, like mock-orange, or the lemon fragrance of citriodora, but also the pungent stench of the durian fruits and the cadaver-like odour of the Rafflesia. All of it reminded the botanist of the near infinite variety of plant life, the endless promise and possibility. Ornithologists had more or less run out of birds. They might yet discover one or two new species—maybe recover an isolated stand of Ivory-billed woodpeckers every fifty years—but the day to day life of a bird scholar was more like that of a classicist than that of an explorer. But botany! The Amazon basin alone was home to tens of thousands of un-catalogued species, any one of which might cure cancer or taste of ambrosia. Which was why Arnold enjoyed relaxing in the wet greenhouse, as others might savour a Jacuzzi or a sauna, letting the plant world pollinate his lungs. He sat on a wooden shelf with the sunflower braced on his lap.
“Apologize,” he said—and he picked a petal.
He plucked a second petal: “Don’t apologize.”
If only it could be that easy—following the dictates of chance. But of course it could be that easy. All he had to do was to beg forgiveness and he’d be off the hook. His life would once again be his own. He might even win public esteem for his confession like those adulterous televangelists, forcing the genie back into the bottle except that was what everybody expected of him. What everybody wanted. He’d apologize, and adopt a kid, and six months later he’d be at a baseball game singing God Bess America—and even he wouldn’t care anymore.
He pulled out more petals. “Apologize. Don’t apologize. Apologize.” Soon the blossom was nearly bald. Before the plant rendered a verdict, he dozed off.
Although Arnold slept less than a quarter of an hour, when he awoke, it felt like a new day. What a difference a few minutes made. Sunshine was already streaming through the skylights and Lucinda’s Myna bird, which she kept behind the lycopodium and old world ferns, was scratching at the door of its cage. The sunflower lay at Arnold’s feet, mutilated, and he’d long lost track of where he was in his plucking. The botanist dropped the remains in the compost bin.
In his office, the television was still playing. But miraculously, the right-wing cable channel was no longer covering his case. Instead, they’d apparently glommed on to a fresh cause célèbre, this one an urban crime scene involving yellow police tape. Arnold was about to shut the machine off when he heard his own name mentioned. Mr. Brinkman, said the newscaster, may be armed and is presumed to be dangerous. That’s when the crime scene came into focus. They were showing the Church of the Crusader with a police searchlight illuminating its enormous windows. Only rather than one broken pane, all of the glass was shattered. “He ran from window to window like a maniac,” Spotty Spitford explained. “I’d given him a Bible in the hope that it might soothe his anger, but that wasn’t the Lord’s will. What did he do with it? He used it as a weapon against God. The beast—for it’s hard to think of a hatemonger like that as anything else—seemed determined to knock out every window in the tabernacle. I pity a creature who has no love for his own country, but I fear an animal who can desecrate a house of worship.” But what amazed Arnold most weren’t Spitford’s lies, but his clothing. The minister wore a pair of cotton pyjamas and a stocking cap. He’d changed out of his suit before phoning the police. “It pains me to say that Mr. Brinkman also chose this opportunity to express himself through racial invective. He called me a word that begins with the letter N that I will choose not to repeat.”
So the exploits of the Tongue Traitor grow increasingly deranged, observed the reporter. Not the fast-talker who usually followed Arnold’s actions, but a higher-ranking “correspondent at large” from the network. If you recall, earlier this week the Bronx county prosecutor announced that she might charge Mr. Brinkman with disorderly conduct. That may now be the least of his problems. We have word in this morning from the United States Attorney’s Office that, after this latest incident, the federal government is planning to charge Mr. Brinkman under the Terrorism Acts. Such charges may include destruction of a house of worship with the intent to incite widespread fear, as well as issuing threats against a public official, because Reverend Spitford is a member of the City Council’s advisory panel on religious affairs. Conviction on any of these counts would obviously result in a substantial prison sentence. That’s the latest from here in Upper Manhattan, where it appears that the Tongue Traitor will soon officially be known as the Tongue Terrorist.