Free Lieberman's Law by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page A

door was a note. The note said, “Bring this note with you. Go down to your mailbox. Take out the unstamped letter. Bring this note and the letter outside. When you finish reading the letter, burn it and this note right out on the street next to the fire hydrant.”
    Berk had done as the note asked, feeling that the man he now called Mr. Grits was probably some kind of nut, but there had been cash in the envelope, a lot of cash. There was also a note asking him if he had thought about the call he had received and telling him he could keep the money no matter what.
    Berk had walked outside, held up the letter and the note so that someone watching could see and burned them both. Mr. Grits was really watching out for his own ass. Berk decided to keep a couple of sheets of paper and some envelopes like the one he had just burned. If he got more messages from Mr. Grits, he would burn the fakes and pocket the real notes which might come in handy.
    Berk visited his mother who was pushing seventy and working part-time at the Christian Resale Shop on Devon where the few dollars that were made went to the inner-city needy. Mrs. Berk didn’t care if the needy were black, white, Jew, or Hindu. She had read the words of Jesus herself and heard Father Brian every week since before the boys were born. She had held her peace, kept to herself, and gone to work for the Resale Shop three weeks after her husband died in a parking garage fire.
    Berk rarely visited his mother. She made him uncomfortable and he had the clear feeling that she was not always happy to see her youngest son. He always dressed neatly when he visited her and even took the earring out, but his shaven head and occasional pictures of him on television kept him from carrying off the role of peace-loving, dutiful Christian son.
    Berk visited his mother that day, though. She was cordial, made him coffee, cut him a slice of cake, told him about his brothers and their families, and listened to him tell a few lies about what he was doing. Then, before he left and without his mother knowing, he hid the money from Mr. Grits inside the broken slat of wood at the back of his old closet. He had already put a few dollars there. He would put a lot more in that closet. Berk had plans beyond making speeches and getting into fights.
    Then Berk waited, talking, marching, even doing a local television talk show and acting calm, intelligent, and highly and sincerely bigoted, insisting that his group never started violence, that they simply responded to it when someone tried to abridge their freedom to speak publicly, that it was television that had named him and his friends the Chicago Skinhead Hate Mongers. As far as the group was concerned, they were just friends who shared his ideas and wanted to protect the United States. He talked about the failure of immigration laws, the government’s appeasement of lawbreakers if they were minorities—Mexicans, Haitians, Cubans, Chinese.
    â€œThey couldn’t do anything about it if they even wanted to,” he had said on one show. “The law is too screwed up. There is no two-party system, just people out to get votes from foreigners so they can keep their jobs and their blood money. My grandparents came here legally. It should have stayed that way. Now, it’s too late. It’s people like us who have to take care of the problem.”
    About a third of the audience, not counting his own people, had applauded. About half had booed and jeered, and the white-haired host had shaken her head at his statements.
    And then he heard from Mr. Grits again. Little kid had stopped him on the street while he was running one morning handed him an envelope, and ran away. Berk had opened the envelope, found more money and a note saying, “Public phone on the right about half a block. Tear this up now into two pieces and dump it in the trash can on your left.”
    Berk had done what he was told. He was beginning to understand Mr.