R.F.K. Is Gonna Burn - Short story - Review

Whole Earth, Winter, 1999 by John Barracato, Peter Michelmore

The Queen of Space and the God of Gods Order Fidel Zavos to Ignite the Senator

The body of the murdered Senator was flown to New York on the evening of June 6, 1968, for the public viewing, and somewhere in the city was a maniac intent on making it a public cremation.

Two days earlier, Connell and I had responded to a suspicious fire in a tavern on Clarendon Road in Flatbush. The back rooms of the bar had been gutted. We inspected the area, wall by wall, until we found the telltale cone of scorching that marked the origin point of the fire on the plaster in the bathroom. Definitive lines across the cone marked the rising heat waves. At the foot of the triangle of burn, a yard out on the linoleum floor, were burnt fragments of a plastic valise, a man's chino pants, and a plaid jacket. The deeper charring of the linoleum and floor timbers underneath these remnants confirmed that the fire started here, almost certainly a bag of clothes set alight with a match. There were no electrical wires or outlets, and no gas jets nearby, to indicate an accident. And the floor charring was not severe enough for a gasoline blaze. Accelerant fires could sear through five or six inches of wood in heavy floor timbers in a matter of minutes. A regular fire ate into such wood at the rate of about one inch every hour. Barely a half inch had been burned away here.

Among the remnants of clothing we found a piece of a hard plastic badge, like an identification tag. We could make out a number, 147, and a location, Glassboro, New Jersey. A fast trip to Glassboro got us the information that this was a migrant farm worker's registration badge--and No. 147 had been issued to a man named Fidel Zavos late in May.

The name was familiar. The previous February I had arrested a Fidel Zavos for torching two churches in lower Flatbush. He had stood outside the second one, St. Matthew's, watching the flames light up the stained glass windows by the altar, and loudly proclaimed that his mother was the "queen of space" and his father "the god of gods." His parents were both dead, as it turned out, but Zavos said they had come to him in his dreams and commanded that he burn down all the churches on Earth and turn people away from the "false" God of the Bible. Zavos went straight from court to the Stoneville psychiatric hospital near Hicksville, Long Island, and I had assumed he would be there, under tight security, for a long, long time. Stoneville confirmed that Zavos had walked out of a hospital recreation room four weeks earlier and vanished.

We knew he had gone to Jersey for a brief period, but his fiery trail in a Flatbush bar indicated that he was back in his home territory and probably ready to strike against the churches. We returned to Flatbush on the afternoon of June 6 and began checking with local pastors to see if they had seen a wild-eyed Latin type with a pencil-thin mustache loitering about their churches. Some time during the night we had a message to contact Stoneville. I called from the Brooklyn dispatcher's office. One of the orderlies at the hospital had had a hysterical telephone call from Zavos in which he shrieked that the American people were now making a god of Robert Kennedy. His mother, the "queen of space," had ordered him to go to St. Patrick's Cathedral and burn Kennedy's body in the fires of hell.

"We gotta problem, John, an almighty problem," I told Connell when I hung up the phone. "Zavos has threatened to burn Robert Kennedy's body when it lies in state at St. Patrick's, and he's capable of Carrying it through."

My mind would not dwell on the shock such a bestial act, or even an attempt at it, would send through an already grieving and shattered nation.

"We gotta find him, but where do we start?"

"It has to be in Manhattan or a subway ride away," said Connell.

"Right. Manhattan, or his familiar stamping ground of Flatbush or Canarsie."

"He doesn't have any money, as far as we know. Probably no regular place to stay."

"Right. That means a very cheap hotel or a flophouse."

Connell was on his feet.

For the rest of the night we visited every flop we could find in lower Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, including the fifty-cent-a-night joints off the Bowery. We had printed up dozens of pictures of Zavos for distribution to clergymen, and these we left with the night clerks with instructions to call our division headquarters if they spotted him. None could remember seeing him that particular night, but the clerks in these lousy hellholes did not look at faces as a rule--just the silver in the palsied palm.

At the Secret Service command post at St. Patrick's next morning, as the body of the assassinated Senator was being prepared for the viewing, we told of the threat and distributed more pictures. Agents agreed that we should join the detail assigned to watching the public lines forming outside, and for identity we were given tiny, round, enamel lapel buttons. The buttons were tricolored; the color of the day, red, to be worn topmost. We were further instructed not to mention Zavos's threat to any members of the Kennedy family.