Terror Flower (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 5) (13 page)

Satter tried to make sure that the town was protected even though he had little time to prepare. First of all he had the town police out in force, a team of ten men of various experience consisting of parking officers to harbor patrolmen. These people usually did town type crimes such as investigating fires and a few stabbings. They also investigated drug cases, especially those of secret shipments for Baltimore and Philadelphia coming in at night along deserted shorelines. He borrowed five more officers from the State Police. They stood at corners in their trim uniforms adding a sense of military precision to the goings on and making everyone walk a little more carefully in the morning heat. The sheriff’s office also had two part time detectives and they were placed strategically to watch for any signs of trouble. These were a man and a woman he had brought over from his old job on the Baltimore force. They knew their business, even though, like him, they were near retirement age. The Coast Guard station agreed to put out both its boats on full time patrol around the harbor and cancelled all leaves.

The demonstrators were already arriving by busloads. More and more filled the narrow street near the hotel. Many held signs, some of them well made from brightly painted plywood. The United Nations was definitely the subject of most crowd complaints. As Satter had suspected, the NUN or No United Nations protestors were there, dressed in purple robes. Confederate flags were visible along with United States banners. Many people dressed in jeans and muscle shirts. Motorcycles purred among the audience. Two well-dressed black women held up a white plastic sign that proclaimed in large red letters that they were members of the Fair Africa Committee of Philadelphia. A second group were also people of color, these coming from New York and from another chapter of the same organization. Children were part of the demonstration dancing and singing under the lead of a black robed man moving his arms and keeping time to a loud song on a boom box. Few of the participants appeared, at least to Tench, to be from River Sunday. He did not see Pastor Allingham, who most locals considered the River Sunday black leader, or any of the people of color he knew to belong to the Pastor’s church. One chant was louder than the others.

Give us freedom and we’ll be free

Give us freedom and we’ll be free

Give us freedom and we’ll be free

Me-o me-o me-o dee

The children swayed in time to the song and snag the chorus at the top of their lungs. A small wagon appeared in the midst of the children and in its bed was a large plaster hand. Its fingers stretched skyward several feet so that the palm and back of the hand were perpendicular to the observers along the sidewalks. Across the palm of the hand were the words,

“All we ask is a friendly hand.”

Tench saw the Mayor in the lobby. She was smiling as she stopped to be interviewed by newsmen. Tench joined her and they proceeded to the room in the lower floor where the committee would hold its meeting.

One of the Sheriff’s deputies, a large husky white man in a carefully pressed uniform, was taking names at the doorway to the room. He nodded to Tench and the mayor. They passed by another table stacked with Doctor Owerri’s books. One of the African men from the Island was sitting behind the table, staring directly ahead without expression. He would only bend his head when someone offered money for a copy of the book. Then he would take the money without a word, place a book in a paper bag and give it to the customer.

Inside, the room was dim. “Just think, Jimmy. This is making River Sunday the theatre of the world,” his aunt said, excited with the prospect of her town being famous and her leadership strengthened among her local male counterparts with this accomplishment.

The room in the hotel where that the United Nations had rented each year was relatively small. It had room in front for the table with the committee, about five persons. There were chairs for twenty visitors. Normally at business meetings only a few audience chairs were required.

The United Nations personnel were taking their places, four men and a woman, all dressed casually in vacation wear, shorts and polo shirts, some with ball caps. These people expected to be out in boats or on the golf course during their brief summer sojourn in River Sunday. They had not planned for lengthy committee work. In front of the panel, a male and a female representative of the United States State Department had already arrived. They were very young, white, and well-dressed officers who seemed very nervous, their briefcases on their laps. The Mayor, who had met these two for the first time earlier this morning, cracked to Tench that they looked like they were somewhere overseas in a fortified villa at the beginning of a revolution, that the main gate had just been broken down by a mad crowd, and that they had realized no place was left for them to hide. Tench replied that she was right, that he expected them to get up and run pretty soon.

On the table in front of each committee member were a scattering of papers and notebooks, glasses of water and a moveable microphone. A podium had been hastily set up at the side of the room for the use of Doctor Owerri. Against the wall behind the podium was another pile of paper bags filled with more copies of the Bell.

His cousin smiled and whispered. “A little bit of excitement really turns on River Sunday. This is going to be good for our tourism bottom line.”

The chairman of the committee, a white haired gentleman, pulled the microphone to rest in front of him and then spoke with a decided French accent. “We are here today to conduct some inter session research and business of the United Nations sub-committee on African matters. Fortunately before we start our regular deliberations we have been pleased to receive the remarks of an outstanding writer on these affairs. Doctor Owerri has graciously agreed to deliver copies of her new book, The Bell, for our committee persons to review. We look forward to her comments for our consideration and further, to reporting to the members of the General Assembly in our committee conclusions. Doctor Owerri, please proceed.”

Doctor Owerri stood, orange robe around her, and clopped in her African sandals to the podium and began to speak.

She began, “When I looked around for a symbol of what I am going to talk about today, I had to search no further than the slave monument in the River Sunday harbor. To me, it is similar to the bell of my book, also in a harbor. My bell called into shore the traders to buy the human cargoes. The slave trade as ancient as it was is still the symbol in the minds of all of us who are oppressed. We know that this can happen again and again, not so much in human slavery of body but in human slavery of spirit.

“I testify to the United Nations here today because I see no value in bringing my case to any individual government. The world faces a catastrophe for freedom and no single nation can fight this war, can face this crisis alone.

“We must first truly in our hearts accept that all people are equally human, subject to the same needs for medical care, mothers and fathers, education, shelter, and love. We must also accept when we say this that the same genes spent on birth on the North American continent could as easily be spent on birth in the African jungles and that the babies from these genes should have the same chance at life. If we do not accept this then we are truly separated.

“As we move toward a more perfect world, we recognize that at present all humanity is divided into those who are controlled and those who control. These great masses of poor, unsheltered, sick and without hope have masters, the elites who use the resources, own all health services and shelter, and selfishly express hope only for the future of themselves and their own children. What we must observe and prepare for is the growth of the controlled to the point where the controllers can no longer restrain them. I would rather see this be a time of joy rather than a time of war, a time of success and welcome rather than a time of fences and horror.

“The cracks are appearing. The war is coming. We know that we have with us those who drive followers to kill the controllers with bombs so as to free the controlled. These humans work each in his own way for the salvation of humanity and for change and they work with few tools to do this, to bring forth our attention to inequities. For these persons, death is preferable to life with no future.

“So what do all of us so called rational people do to save the world from these cataclysms of terror? I see the answer as very simple. The rich must give back to the poor what they have taken. Surely no one truly believes with any sanity that all the rich have is not taken from the poor. If their riches are truly their earned share, I have no problem, but we all know that the rich absorb, in order to fulfill their constantly growing definition of rich, far more than their equal share and thus by definition must take resources from those who do not have, those who cannot have, those who at present have no power to take for themselves This rule of law that protects this theft is no rule of fair law at all but a rule of unfair law legislated by the rich that makes sure that the rich can continue to take. So we must change this.

“As an African let me say that I can see this interchange all too plainly. I have witnessed in my own lifetime the theft of oil resources and the return of little except worn out destroyed farmland for the original owners. I also see that this has been going on for centuries beginning with the biggest theft of all, the slave trade, that existed from the earliest civilizations, even during the time of the Hebrews and Christians and Moslems and Buddhists, where our own people were stolen to insure the production of riches for the elites. As today, some of the controllers were our own people too, misdirected by the values of the outsiders.

“Later the oil companies came to our land and the first wells were dug. We were paid for the oil but our lands were destroyed. The rule of law as much as the laws of physics presented us with no respite. The law says we are beaten before we start to live. We were paid yes, but the payment only served to cause us to undertake debt and that we have incurred. This debt in turn limits us to any future growth and the more we support the rule of law and the draining of our oil, the more we support our status as debtors of the rich.

“Would we be in the right to ask for our people back, those that were stolen, and for the lands to be restored, those that were ruined? Not according to the rule of law. What was done was done by contract and contracts are inviolate according to that law.

“Keep in mind that what I say about my own country could be said about any country in the world. A country may be rich today and poor tomorrow due only to the vagueness of nature, food growth, pollution, disease, age, and the loss of spirit that comes with overabundance. You ask a man in utter poverty living with closeness of death to wait until another civilization collapses from excess and his country is restored while his children and his wife die of thirst or starvation or disease. He would ask and rightfully so, why should he and his die and you and yours live? He sees your television shows. He no longer lives in ignorance of your high living. Besides, the old arguments of waiting no longer convince him. The religions all counsel a future in Heaven but he wants the present for those he loves. He knows also that if the world’s future is left to chance, the oppressor might be replaced with another oppressor.

“Suppose these divergent opinions gain armies and fight for what they suppose are their rights? Suppose they think that the time is ripe for action, that the old world rules of law are failing.

“Where would these armies to carry out this Armageddon come from? First they would come by way of small groups. They could come from that set of people that all countries have in their shadows, those who for a variety of reasons are disaffected and easily brought into the fold, those people who feel it their duty to fight and die. They are there always for those with causes to use them. Once part of an army they can be ruled to carry out the most horrible of tasks planned to sway the greatest numbers of the enemy to accept their goals.

“Fail to stop them by changing your ways and they will grow into hordes. Borders will not stop them and weapons will not kill them fast enough to overcome the birth of new soldiers.

“Let’s look at the answer most commonly given to this problem. Long ago we were told to elect our own governments, that democracy would protect us and rebuild our lands and our future. We did that. Unfortunately, the governments we elected were always in the employ of the same men who had destroyed us, who had enslaved us. These new governments simply went about killing and destroying all the power that we had in the people making sure that no truly decent government could ever be achieved in our new democratic institutions.

“The elite of the world is behind this. Some are public, some hidden, some are corporations, some individuals. It does not matter. They can be found in all lands. They aggrandize, seek more than their share, even profess to give back some of their gains but only at the price of what they might wish, not what the countries might wish, so they remain in power. Let it be well understood that the word for good sounds like the word for god but the word for evil sounds like the word for devil. These individuals are the earthly form of the devil.

“The last hope of all of us is the United Nations. Here the people of the world can reign in these controllers, these elites. No single fighter however he may feel his destiny is powerful enough to stop them alone. He can draw attention but he cannot win.

“We want our country, our home, returned to us. Yes, it is all about our home. Home is so important to all people. It is a universal concept, understood in all cultures, in all languages, and it is something to fight for. Thus it is the cause of war. We want restitution of the resources which have been stolen by outsiders. We ask only that the United Nations investigate this and determine the guilty parties and make them pay.

“We do not want to be a people without a home, drifting around the world looking for a new land when no land is to be found, and our own homeland is no longer habitable.